3 hours ago
5
He lives in a house, a very big house in the country. He has pectorals the size of Bentleys and wears plus-fours so voluminous they could accommodate his fleet of gundogs and still provide room for snarling groundskeeper Geoff (“I would do anyfink for you an’ this famlee”). And yet! Edward “Eddie” Horniman, 13th Duke of Halstead (Theo James), is sad. And aggrieved. A moment’s silence, please, as this powerful hunk pontificates on the unbearable lightness of being the millionaire protagonist in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.
“Four hundred years ago, this estate spread out as far as the eye could see,” he tells Geoff (Vinnie Jones) as the camera swoops over his verdant playpen, a lavish patchwork of abundant hedges and cap-doffing deer. “But it’s been diminished. Year after year. Generation after generation. First came the apologies, then came the shame, then came the contraction. I want it back, Geoff,” he growls, hexagonal jaw stiff with emotion. “I want it all back!”
Well, of course he does. For what is The Gentlemen if not Ritchie’s ode to the enterprising zeal of the Empire, a time when toffs like Eddie spread their buttocks across the map, and lowborn bruisers provided them with endless bleedin’ bog roll? The series is also an ode of sorts to Ritchie’s own empire, in the sense that it is a facsimile of everything else the director has ever made. Which is to say; an action caper composed primarily of fists, shouting and men made of fists shouting “faaackin’ ’ell” in tweed. Only here, the energy that fizzed through his early stuff has been replaced with a clock-watching aimlessness that suggests a wariness – if not an active fear – of the running time. Anyway, here is series two, and it is precisely as irritating, beautifully shot, overlong, extravagantly stupid and fitfully funny as its predecessor.
The last time we joined Eddie, he was up to his cravat in cash, having joined forces with frosty Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) to help head the cannabis operation that the latter’s crime family had been running from a bunker on the aristo’s estate. And now? He wants more. More, by Jove. First, he wants to shake off Susie and bulbous paterfamilias Bobby (Ray Winstone), the duo having held him in a debt-shaped headlock due to their having bailed out Eddie’s financially incontinent brother Freddy (Daniel Ings, who remains the best thing in this bunkum by a country mile). Second, our muscular hero wants to venture into the world of international arseholery via an Italian drug deal with “boss of bosses” Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto). Plus! He wants to become a hereditary peer. This will allow him to a) determine the outcome of a bill to decriminalise marijuana and b) parade around his grounds in a cape the size of Sussex.
Elsewhere, there is a motorcycle chase, some cobblers re a coveted Botticelli and a gloriously full-bodied turn from Hugh Bonneville as the eminently bribable Lord Hawthorne (“I am being greased!”). Meanwhile, the perpetually semi-naked Bobby continues to bark orders from between his sauna and hot tub; an effort, presumably, to become the world’s first fully amphibious cockney.
In the middle of all this is Theo James’s Eddie, a thick-armed enigma wrapped in a yawn. Why does his face never move? Maybe he was born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline. Or maybe it’s the realisation that Eddie isn’t so much a character as a wardrobe of beef in cufflinks, his main contribution to proceedings being to drawl about profit margins while blankly reducing the local partridge population to soup (“I shot another one, Geoff!”)
There’s a certain comfort in Ritchie’s commitment to the bit, a sense of reassurance in the knowledge that in these restless times, his fetishisation of the gentry and preoccupation with uninhibited wide-boys remains immutable. But it ain’t half slow, ma’am. For all its international hijinks, its oi-oi-saveloy geezerisms, you may still find yourself wishing the whole thing would, in the words of Bobby, “gerra faaackin’ move on”.
