Guy Ritchie puts testosterone over substance with The Gentlemen

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      Starring Matthew McConaughey. Rated 14A

      The Gentlemen is a date movie for bros. Fans of Guy Ritchie’s U.K.-based Tarantinoisms should know that this is more of the same, for better or worse. The better part is that the cast has so much fun with familiar material it’s not difficult to simply yield to their judgement in picking scripts and packing heat.

      The head gentleman is Mickey Pearson, a Yankee ex-pat played by Matthew McConaughey with the kind of poise and introspection he usually saves for piloting a brand-new Lincoln. Mickey was a Rhodes scholar who realized selling weed to students was more rewarding than studying Chaucer. By the time we meet him, in today’s multi-culti London, he’s been on the job so long, he’s ready to cash out and join the landed gentry—who remain his best clients, and hosts to his vast operations—in their green and pleasant indolence.

      Returning to the cockney-upstart roots of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels after glossier hits and fizzles, Ritchie is, as always, more interested in form than story. And the central tale-spinner here is not Mickey-Mickey-you’re–so-fine but a tabloid photo-journalist called Fletcher. A goateed Hugh Grant here channels middle-aged Michael Caine as a trickster character who’s really a stand-in for the filmmaker. You see, Fletcher is pushing his own screenplay while attempting to extort extra poundage from Pearson’s number-two, Charlie Hunnam’s bearded, bespectacled Ray—a kind of exec-producer with access to serious funding, you might say.

      The movie is built around the awkward pas-de-deux between these hirsute hustlers, with Ray only listening because the greedy paparazzo has genuine intel on another Ritchie rich guy, an effete American aristo played by Jeremy Strong. The latter has an Asian rival for purchase of the bush biz, although Henry Golding’s character has less to do with the Chinese mafia than with the Chinese market for action movies. There are side-trips with a very amusing Colin Farrell as a boxing coach trying to teach inner-city toughs good values while being himself expert at the old ultra-violence.

      Fletcher’s ongoing patter allows the director to deploy all sorts of cinematic digressions, including standalone music videos and a literal sequel pitch at The End. (Or is it?) The frames-within-frames device also gives Ritchie plausible deniability for the casual racism and random homophobia that ripples through the otherwise good-natured film. And women? Fuggeddaboudit. The only female character of note is Mickey’s wife, “a cockney Cleopatra” dutifully embodied by Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery. She plays an ornamental property whose bluntly presented almost-rape gets Mickey’s blood boiling for the last act. Because bros don’t like other bros messin’ with their toys, do they?

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