Ritchie back to his London tough-guy form
Director Guy Ritchie returns to London tough-guy form with rollicking gangster tale
For me, the most disturbing thing about Guy Ritchie’s new film had nothing to do with casual violence, bestiality, severed heads in freezers, too many beards, or rampant use of the C-word. It wasn’t Matthew Mcconaughey in a pub, ordering “a pint and a pickled egg” in his natural Texas drawl. It wasn’t even Michelle “Lady Mary from Downton Abbey” Dockery speaking in a lower-class accent.
Rather, it was seeing Hugh Grant’s character, muckraking journalist Fletcher, sashaying toward the London office of Miramax. Maybe it’s because the Harvey Weinstein trial is in the news this week, but the splashy advertisement for the company he co-founded and once (though no longer) ran sent a shudder down my spine. The Gentlemen is Miramax’s highest-profile production since the Weinstein imbroglio began in 2017.
There’s much more going on, mind you. Ritchie’s screenplay takes the form of a complicated puzzle box Fletcher presents to London gangster Ray (Charlie Hunnam). Ray is first lieutenant to Mickey Pearson (Mcconaughey), a U.S. expat who runs the biggest marijuana operation in Britain. Tabloid editor Big Dave (Eddie Marsan) has tasked Fletcher with digging up dirt on Mickey, but decides to sell what he has to Ray, at a better price.
And speaking of sales, Mickey is looking to unload his operation and retire. He offers it to Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong) for £400 million, giving his fellow American the grand tour, and illustrating how he is able to grow and distribute weed literally under the noses of the aristocracy. (His legitimate cover includes an auto body shop with the cheeky name of THC Wheels.) But Mickey also receives a visit from Dry Eye (Henry Golding), a rival gangster who wants a piece of the action. Grant is clearly having a blast as the nudge-nudgewink-winking Fletcher, and his rambling story-within-the-story is worth the price of admission. The Gentlemen also marks a return to form for the writer/ director who made his name 20 years ago with London-set thrillers Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Revolver, before moving further afield with the likes of Sherlock Holmes
(still London), King Arthur (still
England) and Aladdin (still — Earth, I guess).
All the Ritchie-isms are on display — the profanity, the banter, the profane banter, the profound profanity, and characters who turn out to be much more dangerous than you at first thought. That describes just about everyone in the film, though a big shout-out to Colin Farrell as the avuncular Coach, whom we meet at a take-away, schooling some yobbos on proper counter
etiquette. (As with the best Ritchie movies, you are guaranteed to leave the theatre 30 per cent more British than when you walked in, guv’.)
Whether you welcome this kind of cultural downloading and the violence that accompanies it will determine how much you enjoy the film. Fans will no doubt thrill to what feels like classic Ritchie.
Newcomers may flinch at the racist overtones, particularly the inclusion of Jason Wong as a minor character called Phuc, apparently just so others can make fun of his name. Though the joke will be on them if rising Asian-british star Golding goes from Dry Eye — a Bond villain moniker if ever there were one — to one day playing 007.
The film is all sputter and spark, its many moving parts hiding the fact that very little work is being done by what passes for the plot.
But in the doldrums of January, that kind of breezy entertainment can be just enough of a draw. If it sounds like your cup of tea (or pint of bitter), pull up a chair and let Ritchie spin you a tale.
William H. Pitsenbarger had a posthumous problem. In 1966, the 21-year-old U.S. air force para-rescuer was killed in action in Vietnam after coming to the aid of U.S. army soldiers pinned down by enemy fire. He had elected to stay on the ground when his helicopter had to leave.
He was awarded the Air Force Cross for heroism, but his army comrades thought he deserved the Medal of Honor. But by 1999, with no upgrade in sight, it was difficult to rouse much enthusiasm for a long-dead soldier from an unpopular conflict.
Todd Robinson, writer/director of The Last Full Measure, has a similar problem. Not only does he have to tell the story of Pitsenbarger’s exploits and the push to see him properly honoured, he also has to make audiences another 20 years in the
future care about the outcome. And while the story he tells is interesting, it falls short of the powerful sentiment for which it’s so clearly reaching.
His “inspired by a true story” screenplay takes a few liberties — though none, as near as I could tell, with Pitsenbarger’s exploits. As played by Jeremy Irvine in flashback, he was clearly a selfless soldier. When his body was discovered after the battle in which he saved at least nine men, it was clutching a rifle in one hand and a medical kit in the other.
But in Robinson’s version, the task of investigating his worthiness for a Medal of Honour falls to Pentagon up-and-comer Scott Huffman (Sebastian Stan), who puts his career on the line as he interviews Vietnam vets and discovers, if not quite a conspiracy, then an unwillingness to honour mere enlisted airmen with the nation’s highest personal military decoration. (A post-credit sequence notes that of almost 3,500 recipients, only three fall into this category.)
The reality was a little less screen-worthy. Military historian W. Parker Hayes Jr. came across Pitsenbarger’s story while working at the Airmen Memorial Museum in the late ’90s, wrote a short biography of the man and then started interviewing survivors and putting together the Medal of Honor recommendation.
The interviews make up the bulk of The Last Full Measure, and feature a who’s who of elder stars — Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, William Hurt, John Savage and Peter Fonda in his final role. They do a respectable mix of bitter, cranky, squirrelly, haunted and grief-stricken as they relive their memories, while the movie obligingly cranks back to younger actors in flashbacks, in what unfortunately resembles merely a second-rate Vietnam War movie.
Egged on by the dead airman’s parents (Christopher Plummer and Diane Ladd), who want their son to be properly honoured while they’re still alive, Huffman digs deep into the war, going so far as to visit a Col. Kurtzian figure who has retired to Vietnam to grapple with his memories of the conflict.
It’s a quirky mix of Beltway politics and combat scenes as Huffman works his way toward a conclusion — triumphant or mournful I shall not reveal.
And while you may not be fully engaged by the drama of the telling, it at least makes a decent case for its central argument. If Forrest Gump can get the Medal of Honor almost by accident, surely this real hero deserves one too.