THE GENTLEMEN : Tuesday 7th January 2020.

I saw the MA15+ Rated 'THE GENTLEMEN' this week from British Director, Producer and Screenwriter Guy Ritchie. He is no stranger to the British crime drama often tinged with a hint of tongue firmly planted in cheek comedy, a la 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels', 'Snatch', 'Revolver' and 'RocknRolla' which have helped propel its emerging stars into mainstream success - including Jason Statham, Tom Hardy, Idris Elba and Vinnie Jones. Here Guy Ritchie, is going back to his London gangland genre roots with his latest crime comedy offering that he Directs, Co-Produces, wrote the Screenplay for and also came up with the story with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies. The film was released in the UK last week too, and not in the US until the back end of January, and has so far taken US$8M at the Box Office, and judging by the packed cinema theatre I attended this week, it looks like this is a winner!

Our film opens up with American expat Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) alighting from his chauffeur driven car and walking into a London pub, in what looks like pre-opening time, and orders from the barman a pint of London's finest Gritchie (get it!) ale and a pickled egg. He sits down at a table in the empty pub and calls his wife, saying that's its steak night, dinner later that evening at The River Cafe at 9:00pm, at which point an unknown gunman enters the room unheard, and shoots at Mickey. Cut to the red crimson stuff plastering the table and the pint glass in front of him. Roll the title credits and you could easily be mistaken for thinking that you are watching the latest James Bond offering, as Ritchie here has copied to good effect from the Bond play book.

We then enter the home of Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), Mickey's consigliere and right hand man, and as Raymond prepares to settle in for the night, his peace is disturbed by Fletcher (Hugh Grant) lurking in the shadows in wait. Fletcher is a sleazy tabloid newspaper investigative journalist who has been doing a lot of digging into Mickey's history, his business exploits and his connections and its through an extended interview with Raymond that we learn of Mickey's business empire. Fletcher works for Big Dave (Eddie Marsan), the Editor at the newspaper, who has an axe to grind with Mickey for disrespecting him at a lavish gathering in front of various movers, shakers and high powered associates of his.

And so Fletcher begins to recount everything he knows of Mickey's exploits as though he's prepping a movie script, and in fact he has written one based on what he has come to know of Mickey. And so we learn that Mickey hailed from a dead end family in the US, but despite his less than humble upbringing he gained a scholarship to Oxford University. There he quickly learned that there was a demand amongst the student population for weed, skank, sweet Mary Jane, ganga - marijuana. As his university business began to flourish, so he broadened his horizons and ultimately grew his business but not without getting blood on his hands and taking out those who would oppose him, stand in his way, or try to muscle in on his action. And now after thirty years at the top of England's marijuana supply game, Mickey has decided it's time to retire. Fletcher thinks he's been incredibly cunning and thorough in his investigations and unfurls all of his collected intelligence to Raymond, seeking £20M to keep quiet and ride off into the sunset never to be heard from again. Needless to say Raymond is fiercely loyal to Mickey, and sits intently listening to what Fletcher has to say, occasionally chipping in to neither confirm nor deny the allegations being made, but asking for clarification or responding to a direct line of questioning.

Wanting therefore to liquidate his weed farm empire which is concealed very cleverly within twelve stately homes of the well off and not so well off landed British gentry, spread across the length and breadth of the land, there are two very interested parties circling. Those interested parties are specifically Jewish American billionaire Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong) and young pretender Chinese mobster 'Dry-Eye' (Henry Golding).

Mickey is in favour of selling his business to Matthew and has no time for the Chinese upstart Dry Eye, and so he takes Matthew on a tour of one of his weed facilities buried somewhere in the remote English countryside under the grounds of a stately residence for which Mickey pays the owner of the property £1M annually. Mickey announces to Matthew that he is looking to sell his business for £400M in total including his network of European connections, his distribution channels and the whole caboodle. Matthew doesn't baulk at that figure, when Mickey tells him that ten years from now the business will be worth half a trillion!

Later Dry-Eye pays an uninvited visit on Mickey and states in no uncertain terms that he wishes to buy the business and taps out an undisclosed sum on his smart phone. To which Mickey retorts that his business is not for sale, the sum quoted is an insult anyway, and he should leave as he's busy. Dry Eye persists saying that its a very good offer as Mickey grows increasingly impatient, and is ultimately shown the door, through which Dry Eye exits with one of his henchmen, none too pleased at the dismissal.

One evening under cover of darkness, Mickey's farm that he had previously shown to Matthew is raided by five beefed up tracksuit wearing youths who do their very best to beat up and overpower several of Mickey's more sturdy, yet older workers, and rob Mickey of many of his marijuana plants. The lads in question all record this and live stream it over the Internet, and in no time, Mickey, Raymond and Mickey's wife Rosalind (Michelle Dockery) are witnesses to the robbery and the beatings unfolding before their very eyes from the comfort of a sofa far away. Outraged Mickey and Raymond go on the hunt for the perpetrators, and who could have revealed the location of his underground marijuana bunker.

Enter Coach (Colin Farrell) who runs a boxing gym for disadvantaged youths and to get the youngsters off the streets and away from a life of crime. It just so happens that the gang who raided Mickey's premises, are a group of lads under Coach's mentorship. When Coach finds out that it was his lads who were at the centre of the robbery, he is none too pleased, having heard of Mickey's reputation with those who dare cross him. Coach tracks down Raymond, seeks his forgiveness and says that he will do whatever it takes to make amends for his boys misdeeds, as long as Mickey agrees not to take revenge on them. Raymond says he'll consider it, if Coach can uncover who ordered the robbery.

In no time at all, Coach has the robbery organiser Phuc (Jason Wong) bound and gagged in the boot of his car, and delivered to Raymond. Phuc is manhandled out of the boot, and quickly makes a run for it, jumps over a high wall and lands several metres below straddling a railway track, only to be promptly run over by a speeding intercity express train, with Coach and Raymond looking on from above.

By now, Matthew is getting agitated over the recent incident at one of Mickey's farms and is starting to show signs of cold feet. Meanwhile, Mickey has visited another of his farms and learned that the property owners drug addled pop star teenage daughter is shacked up somewhere doing hard drugs with a bunch of no hopers. Mickey offers to help find the daughter Laura Pressfield (Eliot Sumner), and tasks Raymond with tracking her down, which he is reluctant to do. Needless to say, Raymond is successful with two of his henchmen in tracking down the group and Laura to a tenement block, but in an ensuing scuffle a Russian lad who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time gets thrown out of the window several storey's up and crashes to the ground stone dead. All this is filmed on smart phones by a group of local likely lads hassling Raymond's driver in the street below. The men give chase through the estate to retrieve the smart phones and the potentially damning evidence against them, eventually catching up with the youths and 'persuading' them to part company with their phones. We learn that the Russian lads father is a former high ranking official from the KGB, now resident in England, where his son attended private school. Laura is returned safe to her family.

Fletcher is still laying out all these facts that he has witnessed and has photographs of to Raymond to further reinforce his case for his £20M hush money. Dry Eye is still putting pressure on Mickey, and so Mickey and Raymond pay a visit to his ageing Uncle who runs a cocaine and heroin pushing business at arms length so that there is no comeback on him. Mickey threatens the uncle with exposure and further less subtle repercussions if Dry Eye doesn't get off his back. When the uncle speaks with Dry Eye and tells him to ease off, Dry Eye shoots uncle in the back, dead.

Fletcher reveals one last video clip of Matthew sat next to Dry Eye at a football game in which they are seen and heard to be collaborating together to drive down Mickey's asking price to rock bottom. When he is done with his story telling to Raymond, he gives him 72 hours to come up with the £20M, and leaves. Over the course of the next couple of days, Mickey is heard speaking with Rosalind over the phone from the office of her all female very upmarket auto repair shop, in which Dry Eye is present with the intention of kidnapping her to put pressure on Mickey to comply. Mickey senses something is not right, and here we go back to the very opening scene where the blood is spattered all over Mickey's pint and pickled egg. The man who pulled the gun on Mickey is a Russian who was shot in the back of the head by Raymond who arrived just in the nick of time.

Mickey is involved in a head on collision with a truck en route, from which he scrambles out of the upturned car and races to the auto shop, only to find that Rosalind has shot two of Dry Eye's henchmen in the forehead with a small gifted twin chamber hand gun. Dry Eye is furious and he fights with Rosalind gaining the upper hand and has her pinned down on a desk when Mickey arrives and shoots him dead.

Later Mickey is in conversation with Matthew at one of his refrigerated distribution outlets discussing the deal. Matthew states that Mickey's business is now worth £120M and not the £400M as originally discussed because of the events that have unfolded since the raid, that all twelve of his farms are impacted by this, and that it will take three years for the business to re-establish itself. Mickey turns the tables on Matthew showing him the footage of him conversing with Dry Eye at the football game, and says that he knows it was him who turned over the location of the farm that got raided. Mickey also reveals the now hanging and frozen body of Dry Eye behind a pile of boxes in a freezer container, and says that Matthew has one hour to transfer £100M into his bank account and to give up a pound of his flesh for all the hurt he has caused his business, which is no longer for sale.

When Mickey gets into his car and is driving off, it is revealed that it's not his usual driver behind the wheel but two smiling Russians, one pointing a pistol directly at Mickey. In the meantime, Fletcher has returned to Raymond's place after 72 hours expecting to collect on his £20M, only for the pair to be greeted by two more Russian henchmen wielding guns. Fletcher runs off. The two Russians are taken out by Coach, who by now has more than made good on his commitment to Raymond. Coach's track suited boys meanwhile, follow Mickey's car in a minivan before it leaves the premises, overtake the car, and open fire from the back all guns blazing killing outright the pair of Russians seated in the front, so allowing Mickey to escape out the back unharmed.

Fletcher is last seen pitching his movie script to a Producer at Miramax Studios in London. The Producer ask what happens to Mickey, to which Fletcher responds, 'that's for the sequel'. Fletcher excuses himself as he has an appointment in LA with another Studio and must catch a flight. As he gets into a London cab, Raymond reveals himself to be the driver. Mickey and Rosalind settle down for a cozy night at home.

With 'The Gentlemen' Guy Ritchie has returned to form following an averagely received but nonetheless US$1B+ live action remake of Disney's 'Aladdin', the disastrous 'King Arthur : The Legend of the Sword' and the lacklustre 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E'. The film features stand out performances from the principle cast especially Hugh Grant channelling Michael Caine, has fast paced wise cracking razor sharp foul mouthed dialogue, tangled plots, twists aplenty, snappy editing, racial insults that come thick and fast, faux English gentry, good crims and bad crims and those of just about every nationality and cultural background, some real laugh out loud moments, and just enough deaths and beatings and tongue in cheek humour to satisfy any fan of the genre and Ritchie's much earlier works. It's witty, a lot of fun, very entertaining, contains many of Ritchie's touchstones and well worth the price of your cinema ticket.

'The Gentlemen' warrants four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard, out of a possible five.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-