American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.
01 Aug The Gentlemen (2019)
Movie Scripts
Very likely Ritchie’s best. It has his comic characters oscillating between real and unlikely. It has a fully created world, less exotic than Wick’s but more accessible. Super-snappy dialogue.
But most of all, it has the double, triple, quadruple con in layers, where the top layer is the script for the film! Absolutely brilliant.
The most extreme fantasy in this world is the super-smart gangster’s wife. He is a Rhodes scholar and principled soft drug supplier. But he is anchored to his wife, depicted here as the same crazy abstract distance from his world as his world is from mine.
She dresses as an extreme object, and owns a garage that caters to ditsy trophy wives and their supercars. Moves in that world as apex predator. But the garage is staffed by women mechanics, the elite competence. This places her in both worlds, and in the objectified one by choice. She’s the only female in the main group. This reverse gaze trick is pretty studied, as is the desperate chase of her husband to save her from Dry Eye.
Ritchie is all over the place so far as quality. I get it, that filmmakers especially today have to do stupid projects for cash, but must they do them stupidly? — Especially when from time to time they can do something that introspectively advances the art?
Posted in 2025
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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