113 min | R | January 24, 2020 | STX Films
A British weed kingpin wants out of the business and into retirement. Every gangster, journalist, and aristocrat in London smells the opening and moves in. Guy Ritchie comes home to the geezers, but home looks smaller than he remembers.
Michael Pearson runs the largest marijuana empire in Britain from underneath the estates of broke aristocrats. He wants to sell the operation and walk away clean. The buyers, the rivals, and the parasites all circle the deal at once. Guy Ritchie frames the whole thing as a story told by a sleazy private investigator pitching it as a screenplay. The film is less about the drug trade than about its own cleverness, and it never stops admiring the trick.
Matthew McConaughey plays Pearson as a man who has bought the manners of the gentry without losing the menace underneath. He underplays the violence and lets the suits do the talking. Hugh Grant steals the film as Fletcher, a tabloid fixer narrating events with oily relish and a working-class accent he clearly enjoys. Colin Farrell turns Coach into the only character with a moral center, a boxing trainer who keeps cleaning up other people’s messes. Charlie Hunnam plays Ray as Pearson’s unflappable lieutenant, and Henry Golding plays Dry Eye with a smirk that the script mistakes for menace.
Ritchie wrote the film with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, and the framing device lets them stack flashbacks inside flashbacks until the chronology becomes the point. Cinematographer Alan Stewart shoots the country estates in warm gold and the criminal underworld in cold blue, a tidy visual shorthand for the two worlds Pearson straddles. The editing cuts between Fletcher’s pitch and the events he describes, freezing frames and rewinding scenes to flatter the storyteller. The banter lands often enough, but the camera keeps congratulating itself for the staging. The casual cruelty of the humor curdles as the film leans on slurs for shock that it reads as charm.
This is Ritchie returning to the gangster register that made his name, and the return exposes how little the formula has grown. The plot folds back on itself so many times that the stakes evaporate. McConaughey and Grant keep the surface entertaining, but the film mistakes complication for depth and smugness for wit. The gentlemen of the title are thugs in good tailoring, and the movie wants you to find that funnier than it is.