The Gentlemen Cert: 18, 1hr 53mins
By strange happenstance, Guy Ritchie’s new film is full of actors I haven’t always been very complimentary about being really rather good – with one disappointing exception.
The Gentlemen also represents something of a return to form for Ritchie himself, who’s endured a lean old decade following his richly deserved success with Sherlock Holmes.
Sensibly, he has now gone back to what he does best – to what made him, in fact. But, cleverly, he’s also thrown in some of the stuff he’s learnt more recently along the way.
The Gentlemen is a London gangster film (From left: Hugh Grant, Jeremy Strong, Henry Golding, Colin Farrell, Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam and Michelle Dockery)
Yes, just like Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, just like Snatch, even fairly like Revolver, The Gentlemen is a London gangster film, full of dangerous characters delighting in such names as Dry Eye and Lord George, littered with expletive-filled but wickedly funny one-liners and, in this particular case, posh actors trying to convince us they are East End toughies and doing a very amusing job of convincing us – almost.
Yes, if you want to see Hugh Grant in a shiny leather jacket, goatee beard and tinted glasses trying a little extortion with genuine menace, or Lady Mary from Downton Abbey – Michelle Dockery in real life, of course – spouting potty-mouthed lines such as ‘There’s f***ery afoot’… well, this is very much the film for you.
I thought it was a hoot, and a clever hoot at that.
Ritchie’s masterstroke, at least in terms of constructing the screenplay, is to incorporate some of the things he learned when he was married to Madonna and buying West Country estates, wearing a lot of tweed caps and generally becoming something akin to an English country gentleman.
Which brings us to the principal ‘gentleman’ of The Gentlemen: Mickey Pearson, played here by the first of the actors I don’t always like but who is pretty much spot-on here, Matthew McConaughey.
Mickey was born American trailer trash but, clever and resourceful, he made his way to Oxford, where he befriended the sons and daughters of Britain’s landed gentry and started selling them drugs.
Or rather one particular drug: ‘bush, weed, skunkalola’. In other words, cannabis, apparently on the disputable grounds that it doesn’t kill people.
I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say Mickey’s aristocratic friends become very important to him as his marijuana business becomes bigger and bigger.
Big enough, as our story gets properly under way some 20 years later, for Mickey to be thinking of selling up, retiring and spending more time with his beautiful, garage-owning, hard-as-nails wife (Michelle Dockery).
Put like this, Ritchie’s co-written story sounds relatively straightforward, but it’s anything but because we’re hearing it second-hand. It’s being unreliably told by Fletcher (Grant), a grubby private investigator who normally sells even grubbier stories to newspapers but who, on this occasion, has broken into a house in search of an even bigger payday.
His performance is an unbridled joy, his flat London vowels adorned with hints of menace, camp, trouble with his ‘r’s and a heavy cold. It’s one part Peter Sellers, one part Michael Caine, one part entirely his own.
Paddington 2 clearly has a lot to answer for.
But opposite him, and every bit as good, is the second actor I don’t always have much time for, Charlie Hunnam, who here gives one of the performances of his career as Mickey’s loyal right-hand man.
Later, a third, Colin Farrell, proves so funny as a boxing coach inadvertently caught up in the mounting criminal chaos I may have to reappraise his entire career.
The one disappointment in a film littered with political incorrectness, flying dangerously close to racism at times and suffering the odd moment of self-indulgence, is Succession star Jeremy Strong.
He’s been so sensationally good as Kendall Roy on television that it’s disappointing it’s not Kendall himself who turns up as a potential buyer for Mickey’s business rather than the lacklustre and unconvincing drug king Matthew.
But it doesn’t spoil the swaggering, laddish fun. There may be a plot twist too many but Ritchie is definitely back in town.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Jojo Rabbit (12A)
Rating: 
The year is not even a week old, and yet I can confidently predict you will not see many stranger or more divisive films than this in 2020.
It’s the story of Jojo, a ten-year-old boy (beautifully played by Roman Griffin Davis) growing up in wartime Germany and an enthusiastic, if not very effective, member of the Hitler Youth.
He earns the nickname ‘rabbit’ when he is ordered by his seniors to dispatch a bunny and fails.
Jojo Rabbit is the story of Jojo, a ten-year-old boy (beautifully played by Roman Griffin Davis, above with Taika Waititi as the imaginary Adolf) growing up in wartime Germany
In his lonely despair he turns – as so many young children do – to his imaginary friend, who in this highly provocative case turns out to be one Adolf Hitler. He’s played with infectious enthusiasm by the New Zealand film-maker Taika Waititi, who directs and writes as well, and is definitely the man to complain to if this causes offence.
Which it very well might, because there is worse to come, at least for the Nazi-worshipping Jojo.
Not only is Jojo’s single mother (Scarlett Johansson) conspicuously lacking in commitment to the party, but her son discovers there is a teenage Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding in their attic.
What is a small boy with Adolf Hitler for an imaginary friend to do? ‘Burn down the house and blame Winston Churchill?’ suggests that imaginary friend unhelpfully.
There are, of course, precedents for this sort of taboo-trampling, blacker-than-black comedy. Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers is one while Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful is certainly another.
The first won one Oscar, the second three, while Waititi’s film has already picked up a brace each of Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations, and is emerging as a serious awards contender.
I have to say it made me laugh a lot, albeit at times in a distinctly uncomfortable, I’m-not-sure-I-should-be-doing-this way. But although it serves up at least one very nasty shock, and eventually does address the inherent evil of the Nazi regime, it never quite delivers the big, emotional punch in the guts – in the way that Life Is Beautiful does – to remind you of the true horrors of war, and of the Holocaust in particular.
Much of it, however, is extremely well made. I loved the way Waititi – who made Thor: Ragnarok and Hunt For The Wilderpeople – introduces aspects of modern music, dancing and speech idioms into his relentlessly energetic production.
‘Heil me, ma,’ implores the imaginary Hitler at one point.
And he draws wonderful performances from his young cast, not least from Archie Yates, who plays Jojo’s plump friend Yorki and is responsible for some of the funniest moments in the entire film.
The adults are good too, particularly Sam Rockwell, who seems to combine elements of Catch-22, M*A*S*H and quite possibly ’Allo, ’Allo! to play one of the silliest Nazi officers we’ve seen in a long time.
Provocative but definitely one to see for yourselves.