I should preface this by saying that I am not familiar with Guy Ritchie’s work. The only other film I remember seeing that he’s directed is “Aladdin,” so I’m not sure what I was expecting in “The Gentlemen,” but this is the first film I’ve seen in a while that I cannot gauge—a truly neutral feeling. 

It was entertaining, but I also never want to see this film again. “The Gentlemen” left me without a true sense of Guy Ritchie’s style, and given that he wrote, produced and directed this film, that is disappointing. If chaos was the goal, then “Mission Accomplished.”

Totes hit the “watch-check” at the 20- and 40-minute mark. 

Given the chaos, I noted the odd and inconsistent changes in hue (color). Some segments during the introduction felt cool, more bluish tones. Then, it would jump between yellow/brownish, and back to cool tones. And I’m not referring to like lighting against production design and costumes/makeup—there were obvious clashes in scope, which confused the tone (doubly). Which certainly begs the question:was this dysfunction deliberate, or was just poor editing??

The characters didn’t quite work/mesh either, and the writing was a bit sloppy with broad strokes of blatant racism that didn’t really work. There’s a way to make racist shit work (ask Quentin, he seems to always get a pass), but the writing has to be strong! ‘Twasn’t here, and that’s disappointing because it felt like a waste of a great cast. 

The multi-story, multiple tangent narrative was better applied with Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out,” and the cast was well-balanced too. 😊 I cannot overstate how stylistically-varied this film is, and how hard it is to construct this review. Like, one of the transitions, smack in the middle of the film I might add, was the iris-in “fade-to-black” trope typically used to end an MGM cartoon. Bruh, I open-mouthed cackled in the theater when it happened! It was so random, yet totally fit amongst the other entropy of the film. Honestly, I believe these creative decisions were deliberate, and I just didn’t get it/care for it.

(Note: The iris-in shot in”The Gentlemen” was unlike the one used in the gif above from “The Departed” because it wasn’t focused on any particular character/moment. It seemed to be applied in order to cut to the next thought/scene, and came across as lazy storytelling.)

“The Gentlemen” felt like it was distributed a decade too late, à la “Venom” and “Aquaman”—like it was written in 2003 and finally released in the 2010s. Reminds me of how I felt when I saw “Bad Times at the El Royale”—nothing. “The Gentlemen” was weird, and not in a good way, and tried incredibly too hard to be clever in its conclusion.