Watch: The Gentlemen
Finally got around to watching this Guy Ritchie movie. I loved Snatched and Locked, Stocked and Two Smoking Barrels, RockNRolla wasn’t bad either, but was a bit disappointed with King Arthur, which felt like a complete departure from his usual work. Disregarding the obvious difference in the source material, it felt just like Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl in how different it was from the rest of his work.
The Genetlmen seems to try to revisit what made his earlier works really good, which in my opinion was the writing: good, comedic dialogue and an interesting, interwoven story against the backdrop of a goofy British criminals. It’s not a bad movie, but it felt almost like a spiritual parody of Layer Cake with a Guy Ritchie flavor. It has the same sort of backbone about a drug dealing middle man trying to get out of the business, struggling to do so because of betrayal and inconvenient happenstances.
What I liked most about Ritchie’s earlier work was how well the dialogue was written. There are glimmers of that in this film, particularly with Hugh Grant’s performance, which was fantastic, but overall, I felt the pacing of the dialogue was dragging due to the heavy exposition. Too many times was there a recounting of what had happened rather than an interesting conversation that was working to drive the story. I think this was the same reason why I hated The Grand Budapest Hotel. It was unnecessarily layered, too complicated in structure for it’s own good. Not to mention the fact, that I thought the lines were too long and/or didn’t have a good rhythm to them, and that I didn’t care much for Charlie Hunnam’s delivery. He just sounds like a robot to me.
Regardless, I thought it was still a decent movie, worth at least a viewing. Colin Farrel delivers a few funny moments and the interwoven story with multiple plot lines, while predictable, was still entertaining.
On another note, I didn’t realize Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes, Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Wrath of Man so I guess I’ll get around to watching those as well eventually.