The Gentlemen review: Guy Ritchie’s unnecessary and bloated TV spin-off eventually spins out of control

Critics preferred the latter but neither made much of a splash at the box office. Another flashy Ritchie epic, the hilariously titled The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is due in April. Yep, this man likes to keep himself busy — and now it appears he’s determined to dominate the small screen, too.

Here, Ritchie creates, co-directs and co-writes a TV spin-off of The Gentlemen, his 2020 crime comedy about a cocky American drug lord in England (Matthew McConaughey) whose early retirement goes sideways.

Why, you may ask, do we need a spin-off of The Gentlemen? We don’t. A clownish, cartoonish endeavour, Ritchie’s original film acquired a tidy profit and did everything it needed to in the storytelling department. Hardly his best, far from his worst, the film huffed and puffed its chest in all the usual Ritchie ways. Hugh Grant (a comical supporting player) and Colin Farrell (likewise) had their fun, as did McConaughey. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a single viewer who asked for more.

The Gentlemen - Official Trailer

A sketchy, superficial follow-up, loaded with bad ideas and creaky plotting, The Gentlemen (Netflix) dances to a familiar beat, but it’s a different story, with new characters, a new setting and all new annoyances.

A charmless British soldier (Theo James’s Eddie Halstead) is called home to say goodbye to his dying father, a powerful aristocrat with a terrible secret. A grumpy, quiet type, Eddie returns to the family’s vast countryside manor just in time to catch his dad’s final breath. Sad times, but it’s only after the will is read that our sullen protagonist realises what he’s in for. It appears Eddie has inherited his old man’s estate. It was supposed to go to his brother Freddy (an over-the-top Daniel Ings), but daddy didn’t trust the eldest boy to protect his legacy — and why would he?

Freddy is a liability and has fallen in deep with the wrong people. He owes £8m to a group of vicious Liverpool gangsters — and if he doesn’t cough up by the end of the week, they’ll take a knife to his favourite appendage.

Nasty stuff, but perhaps Eddie can help. His initial plan was to sell the family estate to a wealthy US businessman (Giancarlo Esposito), but that all changes after a persuasive London gangster (Kaya Scodelario’s Susie Glass) shows up and explains to Eddie what’s been happening beneath his father’s gaff.

Long story short, there’s an enormous cannabis grow house beneath the floorboards, worth a lot of money to a lot of powerful people. Susie, then, is keen to keep the business running smoothly, so she sets about calming the violent Scousers.

One thing leads to another, and the bad guys agree to cut Freddy’s debt in half — but he’ll still need to apologise, and a dodgy debt collector (Peter Serafinowicz’s Tommy Dixon) has an unusual request: he wants Freddy to dress up as a chicken and to perform a humiliating musical apology on camera.

A small price to pay, says Eddie, but Freddy is outraged and, after snorting a sizeable amount of cocaine, the sillier Halstead sibling grabs himself a shotgun and blows Tommy’s head off. Carnage ensues.

It’s an amusing set-up but, like most of Ritchie’s yarns, it eventually spirals out of control. The difference between this and every other Ritchie tale is that there is more of it — too much, in fact, and the veteran filmmaker struggles to keep a lid on things.

His story is bloated and poorly managed; his characters behave like children and his dialogue is loaded with convoluted metaphors and baffling analogies. We’re used to this sort of thing but again, The Gentlemen 2.0 has a longer run time, and so every geezer gets a chance to humiliate themselves. It is as if Mr Ritchie used a Word of the Day toilet paper roll to help him write lines. Everyone sounds stupid, and poor Theo James looks as if he has wandered onto the wrong set.

Nice work from Vinnie Jones, though, who plays a wise old groundskeeper with an endless supply of tea and Jammie Dodger biscuits. That chap deserves his own show.

The Gentlemen premieres on Netflix, March 7