Movie Reaction: The Gentlemen

Formula: Seven Psychopaths / Snatch

It's official. I have a new movie trope that I'm over. I'm don't like movies being self-referential about the fact that they are a story. I'm over it. That's a bummer too. I used to love that idea. The episode of House "Three Stories" remains one of my favorite TV episodes ever. My favorite movie ever is Stranger Than Fiction, about a man whose life is literally a story. But filmmakers have killed the idea. What once was a clever way to show the unreliability of narrators or a way to upend other story tropes has become a lazy way for filmmakers to avoid criticism. Sure, it's funny when The Dead Don't Die continues to refer to itself as a movie, but it reads to me like Jim Jarmusch protecting himself from criticism. If someone likes the movie, great. If someone doesn't, that's cool too, because he knows the things you didn't like are bad and his commenting on the fact that they are bad by including them out. See what I mean? It's a cop out. This is also the reason why I really couldn't connect with Joker. That movie is massively inconsistent, but then it applies a band-aid at the end by suggesting it was all in his head. What bothers me about this is that it forces the audience to assume that everything that's inconsistent about the movie was done on purpose, whereas, a movie without that narrative device has to own its mistakes.

It's a lot like TV showrunners who call a show a 13-hour movie. When a show is really a "13-hour movie", it's something incredible, like The Wire. Most showrunners just look at is as an easy way to avoid crafting actual episodes and evenly juggle narratives. "13-hour movie" is actually incredibly hard to do and needs meticulous planning that few showrunners are capable of. The same goes with writing a meta narrative into a movie.

The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie's long-awaited return to the crime movies like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch that he made his name on. Story-wise, it's all standard stuff. Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is a marijuana kingpin in England looking to sell off his operation to a businessman played by Jeremy Strong. First, he has to take care of a rival upstart boss named Dry Eye (Henry Goulding) who threatens his operation. What makes this movie a little different is that it's mostly told by Hugh Grant as a weasley reporter talking to Pearson's chief lieutenant (Charlie Hunam). Eventually, it's also revealed that Grant wrote the screenplay the the very movie you are watching.

As your typical big-personality crime movie, I found The Gentlemen to be quite enjoyable. Ritchie is great at coming up with criminals defined by a couple quirks or personality traits. For example, Michelle Dockery plays Mickey Pearson's wife. She doesn't really have a discernible character, but I liked her in this just based on her look and how she carries herself. Colin Farrell gets to play a weirdo, which he always seems to enjoy more than his traditional leading man roles. Henry Golding still hasn't proven that he can act, but he holds the screen and looks arch when needed, which is all the movie needs. Charlie Hunnam is very natural as a well-dressed, loyal henchman who has a super-human proficiency at his job. This is a perfectly entertaining distraction.

This movie gained nothing from the meta narrative though. It barely even plays with the unreliable narrator aspect. And when it's revealed that the whole movie is actually a movie pitch that Grant is making to a studio, I was the bad kind of surprised. All I could think was "Why did they think this was needed?"

Viligant readers may remember that I praised Little Women for exactly the same kind of "twist" ending. Well, that's because there was a point to doing it in that movie. There's no point to it in The Gentlemen beyond being a sort of nifty way to work in some reveals. I would've rather just watched a straight-forward story.

Honestly, I'm harping on this one aspect of the movie because I don't have much else to say about it. It's a fine movie. Guy Ritchie fans should be pleased that he's making something like this rather than Aladdin. There are a few jokes that probably belong more in 2000 than 2020. I could see Hugh Grant's performance rubbing some people the wrong way. That's sort of the point of it though. Everyone else calibrates their performances well. The comic violence mostly worked. It's a perfectly fine movie that just happened to solidify my opinion of one of my least favorite tropes.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend