Guy Ritchie feels like a director that tries to establish himself through a unique style like other big-name directors, but he seems to get that style from featuring similar attributes that other directors love to use. This isn’t a bad thing as many great directors take elements from others in their field, and there are plenty of other directors with styles that feel too similar, but Ritchie’s doesn’t feel malicious or with bad intent, but rather just from wanting to earn his place. He’s been a director that’s gotten decently good reception with films like RocknRolla and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but has also been attached to cinematic flops like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Swept Away. Despite his limited filmography, he has made enough of an impact for people to recognize enough of a style that they wanted to see it return in 2019’s,  The Gentlemen. In the realms of British drug making, the one at the top is Michael Pearson (played by Matthew McConaughey), a cannabis Baron who has grown tired of running his drug empire and wishes to pass it on so he can retire with his wife, Rosalind (played by Michelle Dockery). However, things get complicated when part of his stash is stolen and Chinese gangster, Dry Eyes (played by Henry Golding) wishes to take the empire for himself, through any means necessary. After being blackmailed by a shady private investigator named Fletcher (played by Hugh Grant), Pearson’s right-hand man, Raymond (played by Charlie Hunnam) has to discover who’s behind the whole situation before his boss ends up dead. Considered a return to form for Ritchie after being separated from the crime drama genre since 2008, The Gentlemen manages to capture the good and bad of Ritchie’s style to produce an often times overwhelming, but still enjoyable flick.

This movie felt like from its original creation that it wanted to return to the older ways of how Ritchie directed and paced his movies, as it was a film that would try and replicate a similar spirit to his earliest work. This mindset will definitely make his fans happy but will most likely not win newcomers over or those that were on the fence or worst towards his movies. Considering how divisive he seems to be, choosing this course of direction would have been risky, but it seems to have paid off as its one of his more positively reviewed movies in a while. From a narrative standpoint with the story written by Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, there’s a lot of things going on in this movie, and it’s told in a very fast-paced way, to the point where it becomes pretty hard to pin things down even as the film keeps going. It feels like it’s a movie that has so much stuff it wants to show its audience, that’s its doing everything in its power to get it out as quick as possible. Because of this, not only does the movie feel largely overwritten (the dialogue can be incredibly drawn out and needlessly long-winded in moments), but it also doesn’t cement too much of a main goal for the movie to finish on, so it becomes a little unclear what the drive of the movie is until maybe the end of the second act. Overall, the first act of this movie is not very well handled; with long quick-paced rants that go by so fast nothing sinks in, a tone that feels a little too try-hard to stand out that it feels too forced, and a story that feels way too packed in to really care about. Thankfully, the movie starts to mellow out around the mid-way point and starts to become a little better from then on, with tighter pacing, slower dialogue moments with more meaning behind it, not so heavy forced stylisations, and more of an understand of what’s going on and what’s at stake.

What actually really gets better as the film gets going, is the characters. While they aren’t the most well-developed roles as a majority of them aren’t utilized in the movie for any other reason outside of being pieces in this giant mystery chess game, those pieces are given a nice bit of stand-out quirks and colorful attributes that made most of them enjoyable to watch. This is also helped out by some pretty great actors giving their all to these roles. The movie is nicely split between names that a majority of people will be familiar with (mainly Matthew McConaughey and Hugh Grant) and those that a lot of people are going to be unfamiliar with unless they know their individual work. A majority of the performers in this find that right balance of being pretty dramatized cartoon characters but holding back with just enough restraint that it never feels too in-your-face annoying. Now this doesn’t work out for all of them; Jeremy Strong plays a character so obvious in his portrayal that it’s not surprisingly what happens to him in the end, and Hugh Grant’s overly wild cockney heavy delivery can be a little grating at times, but most of the others get through pretty well with great introductions and decent ideas for roles, like a half passive half incredibly violent gang coach or a posh upper-class women working in an all-female car wash. It’s a pretty fun cast overall.

In terms of what this movie offers uniquely for its style, watching this alone shows pretty clearly who and what kind of directors and movies he was influenced by. People like Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone are the surface level ones, but he also seems very similar to people like Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright, directors that also feature heavily quirky characters, a larger-than-life environment and turning the standard into something a little more uneasy. All of these names are impressive directors in their own right, but what they seem to have that Ritchie himself seems to be missing is the defined nature that everything they do is strikingly given their own spin and distinct characteristic that helps make it their own. Ritchie himself doesn’t feel like he ever goes all the way with any of these oddities; like the quick editing, the color co-ordinated locations, the highly weird characters, all of that is okay, except everything just feels pretty subdued by comparison. The shots by cinematographer Alan Stewart are quick, but not distinctively so, the environments by production designer Gemma Jackson can be colorful and unique at times, but never anything that memorable, and his characters are odd and loud-mouthed, but they don’t have that much distinct personality to them outside of that one trope, they never feel like real fleshed out people. Certain aspect comes through as his own like the overly written dialogue, emphasis on gangster-type genres and environments, and a mildly quirky atmosphere, it feels like its in the right step, but never feels like its strong enough to stand on its own (almost like it trying to be a non-superhero version of Kingsman).

The Gentlemen was a movie that brought Guy Ritchie back for some people as he hadn’t really made any movies strictly of his own making for a while (mainly being taken up by the Robert Downey Junior Sherlock movies and the live-action remake of Aladdin), and that is going to be either a pro or a con for some people. Judging how people have reacted to his work in the past, its going to be up in the air whether or not you will like his style of film-making in the long run, but regardless, this movie is a perfectly good one to check out to see some of his cliches play out. There are some decent characters, there are some good acting, there are some memorable scenes, but it does sometimes feel a little cluttered in the style department, often times it could use a bit more weight to feel more impactful, and the opening act is pretty messy and not the most engaging. Decide for yourself if this movie (and Guy Ritchie for that matter) is going to work for you.

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