Director Guy Ritchie has a distinctive take on the action. She is brutal and always attractive on screen. His characters are twisted, with black humor that borders on blasphemous and always on the verge of falling into disaster. Among all this, his films advance with frenetic speed in the middle of scripts that seem shot, but in reality they are not. In reality, they are pieces that come together sooner or later in a great scenario that leads — almost always — to an epic conclusion.
The Gentlemenwhich adapts On Netlix, the director's film of the same name, released in 2019, summarizes the above in eight episodes. But beyond that, it takes the premise of the film — which narrates a territorial dispute between charismatic criminals — and explores it from another angle. Not just because he has more time to delve into arcs and situations. Also, because it shows violence as a valid language. In production, shooting, fighting barehanded and breaking heads has the same meaning as a loud negotiation. What makes Ritchie do what he does best. Telling a brutal, cynical story full of nuances, through circumstances that, at times, make you laugh because they are exaggerated.
The Gentlemen
The Gentlemen is a sophisticated story about the criminal underworld, which uses each of its eight chapters to become darker and denser than the premise from which it comes. Guy Ritchie, who directs most of the episodes and also writes the script, takes up his narrative about a war between criminal bosses and gives it a new twist. The result is the director's celebrated style, now in the form of a more careful, dense and mocking plot.
As in the film, the script by Matthew Read and Guy Ritchie narrates a complicated starting point. Eddie Horniman (Theo James) must leave his service in the military to deal with a family problem. At first, the series does not give too much information and is dedicated to giving details of its characters. So he clarifies that Eddie is aggressive, but for now, all that perverse energy is directed at his training and daily life as an official. So attending to a family emergency stops, in a way, the decision that the character had made to remain in control.
The rivalry of two brothers and a fight between gangs
On the other hand, his older brother, Freddie (Daniel Ings), is apparently the one who will inherit Eddie's considerable family estate. But when the father dies and in a strange reversal of roles that Richie uses to raise the tension, the youngest son ends up inheriting. However, it will not only be money, but also the secret of where the fortune that sustains the Hornimans comes from. Namely: that the patriarch was a marijuana dealer who used the family mansion as a center of operations.
From that revelation, the series immediately takes on a fast pace reminiscent of Ritchie's films, but with meatier and better developed twists. It is evident that the director benefits from having more time and greater resources to tell a story. The Gentlemen It corrects the errors that are usually attributed to the director and turns its strengths into very strong points of the plot. The way the children of a dead trafficker must decide whether to follow their father's business or step back is clever and well-told.
Particularly because it's all due to a twisted partnership with the mysterious and manipulative Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario). Eddie, who always believed he could keep himself safe from the more aggressive part of her, discovers that she doesn't mind dealing with criminals as much. So Susie explores, with concealment and with a dexterous hand, the worst part of her now accomplice.and. Guy Ritchie, an expert in making his characters have more twisted and dark points than clear ones, achieves in The Gentlemenshow a process of progressive moral degradation.
But he does so not through the sermon, but through the advantages — strange as it may seem — that this fall into the dark side provides. The director takes his obsessions in cinema and transforms them into the most skillful and hilarious turns of the series. But laughter does not come through comic relief or superficial jokes. Instead, the script shows that its protagonists are contradictory and cynically depraved, in a mocking dimension.
Guy Ritchie, from cinema to streaming
With episodes of just 45 minutes — and some even shorter —The Gentlemen He tells his conflict quickly, but without making it seem banal. Beneath the perverse humor, the word games and the violence that breaks out almost accidentally, the series makes it clear that this is an exploration of the criminal world. So the plot leaves aside the numerous groups of characters in Guy Ritchie's films, to explore how the English criminal underworld works.
The result is a combination of a production that chronicles every aspect of a business that becomes increasingly dangerous in detail. At the other extreme, it also dedicates interest in how this affects characters who, at first, try to avoid being corrupted. But in the end, they all fall into greed, violent competition, and murder. In the midst of everything, the director gives the series the same air of interconnected plots in different settings. The central arc goes deeper into the possibility of a business too succulent to abandon, but in general, The importance of the plot continues to be in making its characters shine.
The only real problem with the series is its visuals. With fewer resources than he usually has, Guy Ritchie seems to have trouble with his big camera turns or composing atmospheres. Despite that, he uses what he has at his disposal and for the last chapters, the series finds its best moments with slowed down shootouts and chases.
In the end, one thing becomes clear. This is a Guy Ritchie story, with all of his very precise obsessions and points of view. Which he plays in favor of a series that searches for his identity and finds it to become a premise worthy of where it comes from.