The Gentlemen

Altogether, The Gentlemen adds up to an awfully long time to spend in Ritchie’s particular bag of tricks and they begin to feel both same-y and smug. Because we know what to expect, his in-your-face approach actually has the curious effect of being fairly tame.

The Ritchie flourishes are irritating – especially on-screen text cutely translating the drugs speak, so when a character offers “£4m sweetened with a bar’s worth of White Widow super cheese”, up pops the explainer that this refers to a million pounds’ worth of “rocket-fuelled marijuana”. But if you can get past this, The Gentleman is a fun caper.

It’s a slightly underpowered Ritchie film on TV. If you like his films, you should watch it. If you don’t, there is loads of other stuff instead.

Kaya Scodelario is the kingpin in this hyper-stylish though often wheel-spinning spin-off, which serves as proof that Ritchie should stick to shorter runtimes where he can.

The story behind “The Gentlemen” might be more interesting than the show, with director Guy Ritchie rebooting his 2020 movie as an eight-episode Netflix series. Yet despite the dashing presence of Theo James as the unexpected heir to a cannabis empire, the net result blows by briskly enough but yields relatively few highs.

Sure, there’s effort and style in the new-and-unimproved “Gentlemen,” but it’s still a copy of a copy of a copy: Ritchie imitated himself in the movie, and now he’s recreating that imitation. While distracting enough, there’s less tension here than concession; less inner battle than business opportunity.

A major miscalculation that never justifies its derivative existence, it suggests that the British auteur needs to finally let go of the past.

The episodic nature of the show sometimes works in its favor because it allows those kind of quick, Ritchie-esque creative choices, but the overall season-long narrative sags and drags in a way that makes it difficult to care about what happens to anyone involved.

If you were wondering how an eight-hour season could possibly keep up the zippy energy of Ritchie’s two-hour crime capers, The Gentlemen suggests maybe it can’t. While the series goes through the motions, its heart doesn’t fully seem to be in them.

It feels sluggish. It’s also hampered by clunky stereotyping (underworld boxing, travelling communities, fascist toffs et al) and such all-engulfing padding, it suggests Ritchie was overwhelmed by the amount of screen time he had to fill.