Review | The Gentlemen film review: with laddish crime caper, Guy Ritchie returns to his early roots

Matthew McConaughey plays a wealthy drug dealer, Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding a thug with an eye on his patch, and Hugh Grant a grubby private eye

The storytelling is lively, if you don’t mind the swearing and the casual racial slurs, and the cast are clearly having a ball. You might too

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Matthew McConaughey and Michelle Dockery in a still from The Gentlemen (category; to be confirmed), directed by Guy Ritchie. Charlie Hunnam co-stars.

Published: 5:00pm, 19 Dec 2019Updated: 5:18pm, 19 Dec 2019

3/5 stars

After a decade of big-scale Hollywood projects, reinventing mythic characters including Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and Aladdin, Guy Ritchie returns to what he might call, in London slang, his manor. The Gentlemen is a Ritchie film for all those who grew up on his early laddish crime capers Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

Matthew McConaughey plays Mickey Pearson, a successful drug dealer who grows marijuana on an industrial scale, using underground bunkers hidden on the estates of upper-class toffs with money problems. His plan is to sell the business to an American (Jeremy Strong) for £400 million. Disaster strikes when a group of urban punks raid one of his weed farms.

Meanwhile, a grubby private detective, Fletcher (Hugh Grant), with connections to the tabloid newspapers, is attempting to blackmail Mickey to the tune of £20 million by accosting his capable number two Ray (Charlie Hunnam). Typical of a Ritchie script, the storytelling is lively, with flashbacks stacked on top of each other, and fuelled by his usual sweary humour, bloodshed and loquacious wordplay.

Truth be told, there isn’t much here you haven’t seen before, though there’s pleasure to be had in Grant playing a slimy money grabber and in Eddie Marsan as Big Dave, the equally foul “editor extraordinaire” who is looking to bring Mickey down after being embarrassingly snubbed at a party. Michelle Dockery, who plays Mickey’s gutsy wife, also has a riot dismantling her pristine Downton Abbey image. Colin Farrell, as an Irish boxing coach caught up in the mayhem, also charms.

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