Does Guy Ritchie Not Understand What Makes His Stories Work?

I don’t claim to be a great filmmaker like Guy Ritchie, but as the father of a kid who used to love playing “spot the differences between the two pictures” with me, I’ve gotten really good at telling when two things are not the same. And when I look at Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen, based on the writer-director’s gangster movie of the same name, I simply don’t see an expansion or even a basic continuation of the 2019 film. So much so that I’ve started wondering: Does Guy Ritchie not understand what makes his stories work?

The Gentlemen (2019) was a simple tale of Matthew McConaughey’s character trying to sell his illegal weed empire, told in a wonderfully chaotic way through a combination of Hugh Grant’s high-camp second-hand-narrative and scenes of Colin Farrell beating people up while dressed as your nan’s old couch.

The Gentlemen (2024), on the other hand, is the story of a young duke (Theo James) getting involved with the criminal underworld through the illegal weed business. He also has a high-camp older brother played by Daniel Ings, and there’s even famous British movie tough guy Vinnie Jones hiding somewhere in the background. So all the elements for a proper expansion of the Gentle-verse are here but they never come together the right way. The original film moved at breakneck speed but it was a surprisingly smooth spiel where scenes might have bled (often literally) into each other but ultimately formed a fundamentally fun and franticly frenzied flow.

By contrast, the Netflix series is a disappointingly disjointed display of detached vignettes that Ritchie tells with the steady grace of an attack of the hiccups. It’s also *excruciatingly* slow, to the point where I actually found myself putting it at 1.25x speed to replicate some of that roller-coaster experience you typically get with Guy Ritchie’s movies but, apparently, not with his Netflix shows.

Sadly, The Gentlemen lost more important things during the move to the smaller screen. Another thing that Guy Ritchie does great is action, the kind we sadly see less and less. In an era of movie-action ballet where the violence is gory but also elegant and choreographed to perfection, Ritchie has long been our ever-shrinking oasis of dirty beat ‘em and shoot ‘em-ups that made you wince as often as they made you go “Heck yeah!” And there IS some of that in The Gentlemen (2024), but in disappointingly small amounts. The first real action scene in the show comes at the 37-minute mark… of Episode 2. And it’s a great scene! A guy gets stabbed in the head with a dart! But it’s also missing the hallmark catharsis of the original action.

In the movie, a lot of the violence was kind of… soothing, because it came for knobs who more than deserved it. From Colin Ferrell gonad-kicking annoying teen shitheads who are terrorizing a café, to an attempted rapist whimpering in pants-pissing terror when Matthew McConaughey catches him forcing himself on his wife, the action the 2019 film’s action often brought big, stupid smiles to its audience. Compare that to the Netflix series where, during the first true action scene, Theo James goes up against an underling of a tertiary antagonist, if that. It just doesn’t feel as satisfying.

What’s worse, there are some cathartic kills in The Gentlemen (2024) but a lot of them happen off-screen instead of where they belong: right in our aforementioned stupid grinning faces. Oh, and, almost none of them involve Vinnie Jones, which is somehow the biggest crime in a supposed gangster series.

You could forgive a lot of this or at least begrudgingly accept it because “shows are not like movies and what works in one may not work in another.” It’s a bogus excuse, but even if we go with it, there is one problem that Netflix’s show cannot get around: it’s a completely different story than the film. And, again, it’s not an issue of them being two separate things (which they are; you have my expert word on it) but rather the two being thematically in completely different universes.

The 2019 movie was a story about the lower classes, the underdogs trying to get a leg up in the highly stratified world of the UK class system while also exposing their supposed “betters” as dirty, conniving, lying sacks of shit.  It’s a classic story that Guy Ritchie manages to put his own wonderfully violent spin on. The Netflix show, though, focuses on a duke from a privileged family and with that one tiny decision it completely separates itself from that timeless tale. Where once the plot involved people with brains, brawn, and ambition having to work 10 times as hard as incompetents born into the boots stomping on their necks, suddenly you had… some weird off-brand British mix of Succession and Breaking Bad. The chicken breakdown scene is loads of fun, though.

I love Guy Ritchie. It’s a weird thing to say underneath all these negative paragraphs, but it’s true. Ritchie made two of my favorite movies ever (Snatch and Revolver) and I don’t actually believe that he doesn’t know his own strengths. I just think, based on eight hours of painful television, that he doesn’t know how to properly translate what he’s good at to the smaller screen.