You know how the recent TV series Mr & Mrs Smith had the same title as the film Mr & Mrs Smith, and a similar premise, but you could watch it happily without having seen what was only technically the original? Well, welcome to The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s new series with the same name as his 2019 film. It has a similar premise to the movie, but you could watch it happily without having seen what is only technically the original.
The main players in The Gentlemen are swiftly established. A fine, upstanding young officer, Eddie Halstead (Theo James), is yanked out of the army life he loves to take over his family’s 500-year-old estate and dukedom after his father’s sudden death. As the second son, Eddie was not expecting this. The first son, Freddy (Daniel Ings), was expecting it even less. But wills is wills and Daddy’s is very clear.
You would think the fact that Freddy is an inveterate gambler and all-round liability might have tipped them off to the possibility of their father setting aside the primogeniture business, but apparently not. (It seems we are not supposed to question their parents’ decision to give their sons rhyming names, either, but that is a side issue.)
The main issue is that poor chaotic Freddy is in hock, via bad investments and a coke dealer he met in rehab, to some bad men. Liverpudlians, no less! In tracksuits! This seems to be Ritchie’s answer to the charges of racism levelled at the film, which was seen by some as dividing the world into white cheeky chappies who add to the sum of human happiness by dealing cannabis and Asian heroin dealers (“Chinamen”) who destroy humanity. Everything has been dialled down a notch and the only villains now are northerners. “They’re going to chop my dick off!” Freddy tells Eddie. “Which is fatal, by the way! I looked it up!”
So Eddie needs to get his hands on £8m by the end of the week. But, as we all know, it’s hard to liquidate the family Gainsboroughs at such short notice, so it looks as though Freddy might soon be, er, deady. But wait, what’s this? Two mill in the drawing room safe? From an underground cannabis farm in a quiet corner of the estate run by the local cockney crime family? Who were paying the old duke a handsome annual rent and share of the profits for the privilege and everything had been working very nicely for years? But what, in such a situation, should a fine, upstanding baby duke do?
And with that – and the advent of Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario), who is in charge of the cannabis operation while the paterfamilias Bobby (Ray Winstone) is in prison – we are off. Susie provides contacts to the criminal underworld and knowhow, Eddie provides courage and Freddy – well, Freddy just provides more chaos, but that is what a Ritchie crime caper is all about, so good for him. Oh, Vinnie Jones is present and correct, too, as the gamekeeper and Halstead loyalist Geoff.
Deals, double-deals and violent set pieces in slow and fast motion duly abound. A lot of supposedly comic business goes on far too long (the one involving the chicken suit may be going on still). There are bloody fights and deaths expected and unexpected. Characters-with-a-capital-C come and go (The Gospel, Sticky Pete, the hapless Jethro), as do clean-up men and impossibly neat bundles of cash. Little plots give birth to big plots, big plots give birth to more plots, but it all goes with enough of a swing that missing any finer details won’t affect your enjoyment.
There is also a slower-burning narrative fuse in the shape of a painfully elegant rich American called Stanley Johnston (“with a T”, it is added, every time. I think we are meant to imagine a satirical edge to proceedings here). He is played by Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from the Breaking Bad universe), who wants to buy the Halstead home – probably for the cannabis farm rather than his professed architectural interest, because Stanley is the head of a meth empire. Oh crumbs, what a palaver that is going to be.
All is as it should be, narratively and stylistically. You can see it as a meditation on class war and the infinite corruptibility of humanity when presented with enough impossibly neat bundles of cash. Or you can see it as a lot of daft stories crammed together and spattered with blood for your entertainment. It’s a slightly underpowered Ritchie film on TV. If you like his films, you should watch it. If you don’t, there is loads of other stuff instead.
• The Gentlemen is on Netflix
