Review of “The Gentlemen”: as elegant as it is cruel

Director Guy Ritchie has a special view of what is happening. She is fierce and always attractive on screen. His characters are twisted, with a dark humor that borders on blasphemy, and always on the brink of disaster. In the midst of all this, his films are moving at breakneck speed amidst scripts that seem shot but aren’t. In reality, they are pieces that sooner or later come together to form a grand script that almost always leads to an epic ending.

Gentlemenwhich adapts On Netlix, the director’s film of the same name, released in 2019, summarizes the above in eight episodes. But beyond that, he takes the film’s premise, which is about a territorial dispute between charismatic criminals, and explores it from a different angle. Not only because he has more time to delve into plots and situations. Also, because it shows violence as valid language.. In production, shooting, bare-knuckle fighting, and smashing heads have the same meaning as loud negotiations. What makes Richie do what he does best?. Telling a brutal, cynical story, full of nuance, through circumstances that sometimes make you laugh because they are exaggerated.

Like the film, the script is by Matthew Reid and Guy Ritchie. tells a difficult starting point. Eddie Horniman (Theo James) has to leave the army to deal with family problems. The series doesn’t give too much information at first and focuses on details about its characters. So he clarifies that Eddie is aggressive, but for now all this perverted energy is directed towards his training and daily life as an official. Thus, being involved in a family emergency in a sense stops the decision the character made to maintain control.

Rivalry between two brothers and a fight between gangs

On the other hand, his older brother Freddie (Daniel Ings) will apparently inherit Eddie’s significant family fortune. But when the father dies and a strange role reversal occurs, which Richie uses to heighten the tension, the youngest son becomes the heir. It won’t just be about the money, however, but also the mystery of where the fortunes supporting the Hornimans come from. Namely: that the patriarch was a marijuana dealer who used the family mansion as a center of operations.

After this revelation, the series immediately takes on a fast pace reminiscent of Ritchie’s films, but with more meaningful and better developed twists. Obviously, it benefits the director to have more time and resources to tell the story. Gentlemen He corrects the mistakes that are usually attributed to the director and turns his strengths into very strong story points. How the dead merchant’s children must decide whether to follow their father’s cause or retreat is clever and well-described.

Especially because it’s all due to a complicated partnership with the mysterious and manipulative Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario). Eddie, who always believed he could stay safe from his more aggressive personality, discovers that he doesn’t mind dealing with criminals. So Susie, with stealth and a deft hand, explores the worst part of her now accomplice.And. Guy Ritchie, an expert at making his characters more complex and dark than clear, succeeds in Gentlemenshow a process of progressive moral degradation.

But he does this not through preaching, but through the benefits – oddly enough – that this fall to the dark side provides. The director takes his obsessions to film and turns them into the series’ most skillful and hilarious twists. But laughter doesn’t come through comic relief or superficial jokes. Instead, the script shows its protagonists to be contradictory and cynically depraved, in a tongue-in-cheek dimension.

Guy Ritchie: from cinema to streaming

Episodes are only 45 minutes long, and some are even shorter.Gentlemen He tells his conflict quickly, but doesn’t make it trivial. Beneath its twisted humor, word games and almost random violence, the series makes it clear that this is an exploration of the criminal underworld. Thus, the plot leaves aside the numerous groups of characters from Guy Ritchie’s films to explore how the English underworld works.

The result is a combination of productions that detail every aspect of an increasingly dangerous business. On the other hand, he also pays attention to how this affects the characters who initially try to escape corruption. But in the end they all fall into greed, cutthroat competition and murder. In the midst of all this, the director gives the series the same look of interconnected plots in different settings. The central arc delves into a business opportunity too profitable to quit, but overall The importance of the plot remains to let its characters shine.

The only real problem with the series is the visuals. With fewer resources than usual, Guy Ritchie seems to have trouble making big camera turns or creating atmosphere. Despite this, he uses what he has at his disposal, and in the final chapters the series finds its best moments feature slow-motion shootouts and car chases.

Eventually one thing becomes clear. This is the story of Guy Ritchie with all his very precise ideas and points of view. This works to the benefit of the series, which searches for its identity and finds it becoming a premise worthy of where it came from.