The Gentleman Season 1 - Review

Guy Ritchie’s new Netflix series The Gentlemen sees the prolific UK crime caper director bring his distinctive brand of gangster geezers to the small-screen. The result is slickly shot, easy to digest, and regularly entertaining, but it’s also proof that TV is an imperfect vehicle for the zest, humour, and pace of Ritchie at his very best.

When British Army captain Eddie Horniman (Theo James) is drawn home by the imminent death of his father – Archibald Horatio Landrover Horniman, the Twelfth Duke of Halstead – he becomes the unexpected heir to his father’s title and entire estate, much to the chagrin of his unreliable and slightly unhinged older brother, Freddy (Daniel Ings). The backstory behind Archibald’s comically idiosyncratic name is left a mystery, but the show’s opening moments otherwise move at a pleasing canter. The fundamental differences between the cool and calculating Eddie and the flaky and foolish Freddy are illustrated immediately, and no time is wasted establishing Eddie’s sudden predicament.

Unfortunately for Eddie, the estate itself also comes with his father’s pre-existing business arrangement. That is, housing a highly illegal but highly lucrative underground marijuana facility beneath the property. The site is operated by a gang with a host of such operations – all hidden beneath the estates of various other aristocrats who are happy to take a fat stack of cash in exchange for looking the other way.

It should be noted that this is where the connection between Netflix’s The Gentlemen and the 2019 film of the same name begins and ends. The only thing they share is the concept of puff plantations buried under the homes of British aristocrats. No characters from the film are ever referenced in the show.

No characters from the film are ever referenced in the show.

The slight problem here is that Netflix’s The Gentlemen is so disconnected from the film upon which it’s ostensibly based, I found it actually borders on distracting if you don’t know that going in. As it stands, I spent a good deal of time wondering where the facility under Eddie’s farm fits into the wider weed empire of Matthew McConaughey’s Mickey Pearson, only to eventually realise Pearson… doesn’t appear to exist in this world? Ray Winstone’s Bobby Glass and his daughter Susie (Kaya Scodelario) simply run an… identical operation.

Admittedly, once you’re past this, Netflix’s The Gentlemen does otherwise unfold as an entirely serviceable standalone British crime drama, albeit one with less humor than I’d expected from the bloke who brought us Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and indeed The Gentlemen itself. That is, there’s certainly nobody in the series who can hold a candle to Colin Farrell’s Coach – or Hugh Grant’s hilariously slimy tabloid reporter Fletcher – although British comedian Guz Khan’s brief appearance as an outlandish money launderer is very funny. Equally, Dar Salim – who has sidestepped from the far sterner world of Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant to a short, minor role here – is memorable as a Frenchman with a talent for making bodies disappear, and he’s amusingly drunk when first introduced.

In terms of the main cast, James is entirely convincing as the new Duke of Halstead – complete with a suitably aristocratic accent and an appropriate air of sophistication – although his character Eddie is a little one-speed. He’s given the scope to swing from moments of suave assuredness to bursts of retrained frustration but, despite having eight episodes to dig in, it’s never really made clear what makes Eddie uniquely adept at instantly holding his own against England’s criminal underworld.

“Do you know what I love about the British aristocracy?” Giancarlo Esposito’s Stanley Johnston (with a T, as he and others are wont to point out throughout the series) asks Eddie at one point over a drink. “They’re the original gangsters. The reason they own 75% of this country is because they stole it. William the Conqueror was worse than Al Capone.” Eddie was in the military, and he’s a Duke. Perhaps that’s just supposed to be enough.

The fabulous Winstone is invariably in cruise control as Bobby Glass, but there’s no denying that these are the sorts of roles he was born to play. Scodelario is strong as the streetwise Susie, in a crucial part that certainly takes more than a few cues from Michelle Dockery’s plain-speaking Rosalind from the film – although Scodelario is front-and-center throughout the whole series.

However, it’s Vinnie Jones who is a surprising standout. His softly spoken gamekeeper Geoff is intimidating and confident when necessary, but he otherwise carries himself with a quiet dignity that makes Jones’ casting quite interesting – and even a little subversive in the wake of his previous Ritchie roles like Lock, Stock's Big Chris and Snatch's Bullet-Tooth Tony.

The series initially unfolds like a series of Grand Theft Auto missions, as Eddie attempts to extricate his family and his home from the Glass operation and finds himself doing miscellaneous favours for a revolving door of miscreants and madmen. But it does eventually settle into a clearer trajectory as it approaches its crescendo. Threads that came close to feeling abandoned are ultimately woven back into proceedings, but the series’ denouement is ultimately a lot more low-key than the closing confrontations of Ritchie films like Snatch – or the original Gentlemen, for that matter.