Guy Ritchie serves up a meaty thriller-comedy series on Netflix
When we first meet the hero of Guy Ritchie's new Netflix series, he's not exactly what you'd expect from a Guy Ritchie hero. He's a peacekeeper for the United Nations, under orders to deescalate tensions. Can that really last, this being a Guy Ritchie series? Doubtful.
“The Gentlemen,” a captivating mix of menacing thriller, satire, soap opera, gangster caper and absurdist humor, will eventually have blood splashing on walls, but it delights in the promise of violence more than the acts themselves.
“Like `Jaws,'” says cast member Max Beesley. “You don't see that shark for an hour and a quarter of the film. But the idea of it is terrifying, you know? And I think that's quite clever.”
“The Gentlemen,” a sort of British take on “Breaking Bad,” follows an English aristocrat who inherits his family's asset-rich but cash-poor estate and farm only to discover that it also has a massive secret weed farm, run by gangsters. At the same time, he urgently needs to bail his bumbling older brother out of massive debt to even more gangsters.
How the newly titled duke navigates this criminal underworld propels the eight episodes. “Without knowing it, you have stepped into a world that you are not familiar with,” he is told. The series begins streaming Thursday.
Theo James stars as the duke, and he says he loved the “idea of a man falling down a rabbit hole and learning to love violence and power and what that means.”
James says, “He thinks he knows power because he's been in the army and he's part of the aristocracy, but he realizes power comes in many different forms.”
“The Gentlemen” has Ritchie's typical examinations of criminality, but it's less hyperkinetic and frantic than many of his films like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” allowing scenes to breathe and characters to deepen. The body count is even lower.
“We're used to seeing Guy Ritchie in 90 minutes — it's hard cuts and bombastic, which this is. But we had to make sure that we had characters that felt that they could live through eight episodes and beyond,” says James.
The series has been spun off from the writer-director's 2019 film of the same name and features con jobs, a man dancing in a chicken suit, the always-welcome presence of Vinnie Jones, manic murder chases, gagged hostages, a Lamborghini heist, some beheadings and a soundtrack of choirs chanting religious text.