Since Ritchie’s 1998 debut action comedy caper Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, his unremittingly laddish MO has helped prop up the patriarchy. It’s spent 25 years busting womankind down to clothes horses or comedy foils, while fast-tracking Jason Statham and even Vinnie Jones into bankable exemplars of British butchness.
The fact that his entertaining new Netflix series is called The Gentlemen, and amounts to a spin-off of his 2019 film of the same name, only underlines the point. Theo James, who plays a duke called Eddie Halstead, doesn’t demur when I put these points to him, but admits to being charmed by Ritchie’s world from an early age: “Lock, Stock was definitely part of my cultural zeitgeist as a teen. [Ritchie] created this British sub-genre with bombastic energy. It made a huge impression – we used to quote lines to each other in sixth form. It was quite seminal at the time.”
