BEFORE: It's another big hundred-film milestone today, and officially this marks the point where I'm 2/3 of the way through another Movie Year, and not so coincidentally, I'm looking to lock down a schedule that will most likely get me to Movie #3,700 without breaking the chain. I heard in a song once, you should never break the chain. Or something to that effect.
Once I had a rough idea of the July schedule, the big dilemma then became - which McConaughey film should end up here, on the century mark? Because I like it when those films are big, popular or at least meaningful or significant in some way. I hadn't seen any of the films, of course, so I had to take a stab at which one might carry the most weight. This one's the most current one, plus it's directed by Guy Ritchie, and seems to represent a return to form for him, back to stories set in the London underworld (after directing "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" and "Aladdin").
Plus, there's a billboard for it still up in Manhattan (changing billboard ads seems to have become a low priority thing during the pandemic, plus there are fewer newly released movies to promote) and I see that billboard every day I walk from the subway to my office, so that's a constant reminder that "The Gentlemen" exists, and is available to watch. The problem is, I expected this movie to be on a Premium movie channel by now - often my plan is "program the film for next month, and hopefully by then the film will be on HBO, Showtime or at least Starz" - and a lot of the time this plan works, only this time, it did not. My viewing choices are to either pay $5.99 to watch this on iTunes, or $6.99 to watch on Cable on Demand. I went with cable, because the iTunes price would be a rental for 30 days (and I usually only watch a film that way once) and if I get it On Demand, I know I can dub it to a DVD (personal use only, I swear) and then I can watch it any time I want in the future, for just a dollar more.
Naturally, I'd rather pay less - another safe bet was that either the iTunes price OR the On Demand price would have dropped to $2.99 or $3.99 by now, but I lost that bet, too. So I have to pay full price (the only thing more expensive would be to have seen this in the theater, pre-pandemic) but, I'll get to keep a permanent copy in the library. Not that I ever have time to go back and watch a movie a second time from my own library, but hey, the opportunity is there - I COULD watch it again in the future this way, but I couldn't if I stuck to streaming and it disappeared, as everything on streaming eventually does. And hey, it's BIG movie #3,600, time to celebrate, and that means maybe I can splurge a little bit and spend an extra few bucks on myself - I just can't make a habit out of this.
Matthew McConaughey carries over again from "Fool's Gold".
THE PLOT: An American ex-pat tries to sell off his highly profitable marijuana empire in London, triggering plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.
AFTER: Ooh, I think I like this one, like maybe a lot. I've seen most of Guy Ritchie's classic films, like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", and once I got past the language barrier, I remember having a good time watching those. But then his career took a left turn with "Swept Away", thanks for NOTHING, Madonna, then there were a few years spent trying to "Ritchie-fy" classic characters like Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur. I think we started to see what the guy's really capable of with "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", but then what the heck happened with "Aladdin"? I mean, it's a fine film and everything, but is Guy Ritchie really the guy you want directing Will Smith as a Genie? Maybe that one was for his kids or something.
Anyway, this feels like a return to form for this director, maybe a glimpse of where his career COULD have gone if he hadn't been sidetracked by a very public marriage to a popstar who for some reason also thought she needed to be an actress. Right? I mean, other than the "Dick Tracy" movie, where she essentially played herself, name me one movie that Madonna's been GOOD in, like, at all. (OK, OK, "Evita", but that's like the exception that proves the rule...). Let's get the focus back on Guy, because I think this film could be like his "Pulp Fiction" moment - namely the epitome of his style and technique, and he may go on to make more films in the future, but we're going to keep coming back to THIS one, because it's the definitive one, the one that somehow goes beyond being a movie and approaches something close to art.
Part of me wants to tear this apart for the structural problems, the way the film starts off somewhere in the middle, at the climactic point in fact, and then snaps back to introduce the characters and show us how we got to that moment. This is a crutch for most directors, it's like a "splash page" in comic books, that big opening image with Spider-Man already in the middle of the battle with Green Goblin, and Spidey suddenly pauses to say, "Wow, that blast was close. How the hell did I get into this situation in the first place?" and we're back on a quiet morning where Peter Parker is leaving the house and turning down pancakes from Aunt May because he's late for his job at the Daily Bugle. But now we KNOW a bit about what the day has in store for him. In the wrong hands, it's just a cheap tool to get you to read on past Page 1. But in the right hands it's the opening salvo of a complex story, one that's going to open up like a flower and allow you to see inside.
It's also very trendy, and that's unfortunate, because most directors don't properly know how to do this, to peel back the layers of a story like an onion - actually an onion is a great metaphor for storytelling because once you get the outer skin of the onion off, there are so many ways to cut it, in relation to the grain of the root vegetable. If you're making onion rings you're going to NOT cut the onion in half, but instead slice it into horizontal layers and then pop out the middle pieces to make concentric circles. But if you want sliced onions for your cheesesteak, you're going to want to cut in in half vertically, then make those thin top-to-bottom strips. And if you want diced onions, you're going to keep cutting until you've covered all the directions. So what happens AFTER the opening splash scene is very important, and I like the way Guy Ritchie sliced up the onion here.
If you're going to mess with the timestream, bounce around to tell the best story you can, there better be a purpose to it, and in this case, there sure is. We gradually learn who the key players are in this London underworld (Londerworld?) and what they all want. It starts with one man's marijuana empire, which is split up among 12 locations around England so that if any one of them is compromised, the whole operation won't go bust. And they're all underground - literally. Access is granted via a very suspicious-looking freight container with a secret trapdoor - because the authorities would never suspect a freight container that looks horribly out of place on the countryside grounds of an English estate....
The problem is, this American, Michael "Micky" Pearson, came up the hard way. He's got a checkered past, which is fine if he's going to keep operating his criminal empire under the radar, but the word is that pot may become legal in the U.K. in the near future - so he's got to legitimize his business, or else get out of it. (Wait, is this the way things work? Like, are there still illegal marijuana farms in Colorado and California, or did they all have to go legit? Remind me to check that out later...). His plan is to sell half of the operation to another American, Matthew Berger, who's made some similar inroads with the gentry in the U.K. through other pharmaceuticals.
But this action sets off a number of occurences, like toppling dominoes. First, a Chinese gangster named Dry Eye sets up a meeting with Micky to make a competitive offer for half of his business. Then a group of MMA fighters and aspiring YouTube rappers, who call themselves the Toddlers, invade one of the farms, punch out all the guards, and drive off with a vanload of the sticky icky. Even worse, they upload a video of their attack, which basically tells everyone where the pot's being grown. But the Toddlers are trained by a guy named Coach, who realizes what they've done and who they've offended, and tries to make up for their mistake.
All of this is slowly revealed in a conversation between a private investigator named Fletcher and Mickey's right-hand man, Raymond. Later we'll find out who Fletcher's working for, and there are other subplots with Raymond, like his side-mission to get back the missing daughter of an English Lord and Lady, after she fell in with a crowd of drug addicts who occupy a council flat. Some of these events happen in reverse chronological order, due to the gradual nature of the information being revealed by Fletcher (he tends to ramble on a bit...) but that's OK. If anything it made me think of "Pulp Fiction" and how we know where Vincent Vega is going to end up in one story, before we see him have a whole other adventure later in the film. Also, the way that some characters pontificate before taking action, and what happens to some of the people who are held in custody by the lead characters reminds me of Marvin from "Pulp Fiction". Poor Marvin...so I'd guess that Ritchie probably took a crash course in the work of Tarantino, and I approve that direction for him.
Look, I don't know how one puts together a crazy jigsaw puzzle like this - does a writer start at the ending and work backwards, or was the script laid out all in proper chronological order, and then chopped into bits and re-ordered by the framing device so that we'd learn more and more as time went on. Does it even matter when the story is THIS good, though? Between the Chinese Triads, the American entrepreneurs, the British tabloids trying to break the story, the MMA fighters/rappers and the Russian oligarch trying to figure out what happened to his son, there are so many factions vying for control that it becomes sort of like "Grand Theft Auto: London Stories".
Overall, though, an excellent choice for Big Milestone Film #3,600. For McConaughey, this is right where I want to see him - smart, tough, in control and marijuana-adjacent, without being a total stoner and screw-up like in "The Beach Bum". I'd even say this warrants a sequel, which would be a first for Guy Ritchie, I think. Or maybe we need a film that takes all the characters that survived this film, and his other London films, like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and mashes them all together in the ultimate Ritchie-verse crime film. Whaddaya say, let's make that happen, Guy.
Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Henry Golding (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Jeremy Strong (last seen in "Serenity"), Colin Farrell (last seen in "Widows"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Chidi Ajufo (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Jason Wong (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Brittany Ashworth, Samuel West (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Eliot Sumner (last seen in "Stardust"), Lyne Renée (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Christopher Evangelou, Franz Drameh, Bugzy Malone, Tom Wu (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), John Dagleish (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Lily Frazer, Geraldine Somerville (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Tom Rhys Harries, Danny Griffin, Max Bennett (last seen in "The Duchess"), Eugenia Kuzmina, George Asprey, Ashley McGuire, Jack Jones, Shanu Hazzan, Sammy Williams, Ryan Dean, Russell Balogh, Mark Rathbone, Andrew Greenough, with a cameo from Guy Ritchie (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword").
RATING: 8 out of 10 pints of Gritchie lager.
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