The Gentlemen  ★★★½

WALKING out of Guy Ritchie’s latest film The Gentlemen I was impressed.

This was a welcome dynamic return to the British director’s Cockney gangster roots, planted in 1998 to 2000 with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and featuring scene-stealing performances from new additions to his coterie, Hugh Grant and Michelle Dockery.

It’s full of Ritchie’s trademark snappy, expletive-ridden dialogue and off-colour humour, delivered by an assortment of engaging characters and presented within a clever and inventive narrative structure that constantly helps build audience anticipation.

But something was nagging at me and now it colours my view of this film just a little.

Let’s start with The Gentlemen. Matthew McConaughey plays the central character, Mickey Pearson, an American who has made a name for himself over his years in England as the nation’s biggest marijuana dealer. The suave and assured Pearson’s inner circle includes his tough-as-nails wife Rosalind (Dockerty) and right-hand man Raymond, also played well by Charlie Hunnam.

Pearson is looking to make a 400 million pound windfall by selling his business to a potential American investor (Jeremy Strong), but there is unwelcome competition from a rising soldier in a rival Asian outfit, Dry Eye (Henry Golding). Suddenly Pearson’s business is being targeted and his future plans are in jeopardy.

Now let’s consider the 1980 film The Long Good Friday, directed by John MacKenzie which gave rising stars Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren two of their strongest early roles.

Hoskins plays a cockney mobster and Mirren his tough-as-nails wife who are planning to make a killing through investment of their crime cash in a new riverside development. They are entertaining potential investors from America when suddenly their assets start being targeted by rivals determined to scuttle their plans.

The Gentleman is a little different and does have an additional story-line involving a tabloid newspaper editor’s determination to bring down Pearson, but there is no doubt The Long, Good Friday was an inspiration.

In fact more than that. The 1980 film featured two key scenes – one in a cold meat locker that testified to the main character’s ruthless side and the other involving the same character sitting in the back of a car and revealing another side. Both scenes and the sentiments they are meant to invoke are copied to a degree in the newer film.

Homages to the 1980 film? Probably, I hope so, but still they detract rather than enhance Ritchie’s work.

That point being made, The Gentlemen is a lot of fun and Hugh Grant in particular is a revelation as the slimy private investigator Fletcher, in the pay of Eddie Marsan’s equally loathsome vindictive newspaper boss but also seeking to line his own pocket by playing one off against the other.

There isn’t a moral between them and the newspaper man’s fate in particular makes for a surprisingly icky turn – although again a variation on the events in an episode of television’s Black Mirror (hope that’s not a spoiler).

The other character I enjoyed was Coach, a low-level criminal trying to go straight to the extent he can by running a gym but having to clean up the mess caused by some of his young boxers. Colin Farrell also enjoys himself immensely in the role.

And that’s really the key to the film’s success – everyone seems to be enjoying themselves without treating or taking anything too seriously.