THE GENTLEMEN: DRUGS, DUKES AND GOOD TAILORING
Matt Adcock looks at Guy Ritchie's criminal aristocracy…
There are some filmmakers like Guy Ritchie, whose particular blend of sharp suits, sharper dialogue, criminal scheming and sudden bursts of ultraviolence just does it for me. I loved his The Gentlemen movie, a hugely enjoyable gangster-em-up which saw Matthew McConaughey's splendidly named Mickey Pearson presiding over a marijuana empire hidden underneath Britain's landed estates, so when Netflix announced that Ritchie was going to revisit that same criminal ecosystem as a TV series, I was excited, but also I really didn’t want him to fuck it up!!
So The Gentlemen series isn't really a sequel to the film at all but an expansion of its central idea, ditching Mickey Pearson and introducing an entirely new family headed up by Eddie Horniman (Theo 'Divergent' James), a soldier who unexpectedly inherits his father's title, Halstead Manor.
What initially looks like a nice fish-out-of-water crime comedy soon becomes something considerably more interesting because Eddie, unlike most decent people who accidentally discover a drug empire under their house, turns out to be worryingly good at running one.
I've seriously enjoyed this show, so here is my Darkmatters episode-by-episode Gentlemen-em-up, with mild-to-quite-severe spoilers depending on your tolerance for knowing when somebody might end up dead, buried, eaten or all three...
SEASON ONE – WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
Episode 1: REFINED AGGRESSION
Eddie comes home after his father's death expecting to deal with the usual inheritance issues but instead gets a dukedom, Halstead Manor, a basket case of a brother and the small matter of an enormous cannabis farm. Turns out primogeniture is considerably more exciting when the family legacy comes with industrial hydroponics and armed criminals... Welcome home Your Grace :)
Episode 2: TACKLE TOMMY WOO WOO
The wonderfully psychotic Gospel and his crew add another layer of threat and by now one important rule of The Gentlemen has become clear: every problem can be solved, but the solution will almost certainly create three significantly worse ones.
Episode 3: WHERE'S MY WEED AT?
Jimmy (Michael Vu) manages to misplace enough product to keep several counties happily sedated, sending Eddie and Susie chasing the missing weed and eventually into a Fast n Furious caper involving a truly radioactive-looking Lamborghini.
Episode 4: AN UNSYMPATHETIC GENTLEMAN
Blackmail, aristocratic depravity, Nazi memorabilia and Hitler's preserved testicle all collide in an episode which finally gives Britain the costume drama it deserves. Freddie Fox turns up as the wonderfully vile Lord Bassington and the whole thing goes full deranged-posho-em-up…
Episode 5: I'VE HUNDREDS OF COUSINS
Eddie's continuing attempts to stabilise the Glass operation introduce another criminal ecosystem, this time a traveller family whose strength very much lies in numbers. Ritchie has always been great at creating competing underworld tribes!
Episode 6: ALL EVENTUALITIES
Fifteen million quid needs laundering, Jack Glass needs protecting and Freddy decides that what the world really needs is 'crack weed', because apparently ordinary cannabis just wasn't creating sufficient levels of mayhem.
Episode 7: NOT WITHOUT DANGER
Susie goes into full revenge mode after events involving Jack while Eddie starts considering whether the best way out of one criminal empire might be selling it to an even more dangerous criminal empire… Giancarlo Esposito's beautifully controlled Stanley Johnston is absolutely superb here, radiating the sort of immaculate menace which suggests that accepting one of his dinner invitations probably counts as signing a legal waiver.
Episode 8: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BOBBY GLASS
Bobby Glass announces his intention to retire and essentially turns the criminal empire into The Apprentice: Organised Crime Edition, only with a considerably harsher firing process.
DARKMATTERS SEASON ONE VERDICT
Season One occasionally meanders while positioning all the pieces but once Eddie, Susie and the Glass empire are properly locked together it becomes massively addictive stuff!!
Out of a potential 5 you have to go with a Darkmatters:
ö ö ö ö ½ (4.5 – Extremely classy crime-em-up action with a nasty streak hiding under the tweed.)
Awesomeness öööö½ – Gunplay, gangsters and stately home weed farms, what's not to like?
Laughs öööö – Freddy alone adds at least two stars.
Horror ööö – Some pleasingly nasty moments when the criminal world draws weapons.
Spiritual Enlightenment öö – Thou shalt probably not build a narcotics empire beneath thy ancestral home.
The MVP has to be Susie Glass, because Kaya Scodelario somehow makes organised crime administration look both incredibly stylish and utterly exhausting.
Then there's Freddy, a genuine walking public-safety incident… Daniel Ings pulls off the impressive trick of making him appalling, hilarious and somehow still weirdly lovable.
Vinnie Jones' Geoff is the other secret weapon. There's real melancholy behind the hard-man exterior and Jones gives him far more depth than expected, although there is never any doubt whatsoever that Geoff could dispose of a body, mend a fence and be back to feed the pheasants before lunch.
And the season's WTF crown? It simply has to be Hitler's testicle. There are times when television stops being mere entertainment and becomes culture.
SEASON TWO – THE DUKE OF FUCK-AROUND-AND-FIND-OUT
The empire has expanded, the ambition levels have gone stratospheric and Eddie wants influence, territory, status and increasingly the whole bloody board, which means the show can stop asking whether he'll escape the gangster lifestyle and start examining the much juicier possibility that the respectable Duke and the ruthless criminal might actually be the same person wearing different jackets.
Episode 1: THE ROAD TO KINGDOM
Season Two wastes no time announcing its bigger ambitions as Eddie starts chasing political status, the Italians arrive, valuable art becomes problematic and a tiger delivers perhaps the most decisive staff appraisal of the year. Mafia politics, Botticelli, aristocratic scheming and large carnivorous mammals all appear in the opening salvo.
Episode 2: THERE'S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN
Eddie heads to Milan and discovers that international business networking apparently works much like LinkedIn except there are significantly more corpses. The big change is how proactive he has become because Season One Eddie generally reacted to danger whereas this upgraded version plans, manipulates and keeps things from Susie, which is obviously going to be completely fine and definitely won't come back to bite anybody later...
Episode 3: DO YOU REJECT SATAN?
Eddie becomes a godfather, starts dealing with some very amusing unrest among the weed-farm workforce. Does Eddie reject Satan? Not so much as appear keen to explore whether there might be mutually advantageous business opportunities.
Episode 4: THE BIGGER PICTURE
Cannabis legislation, Westminster connections, bishops and a missing falcon make for one of the season's best collisions of old establishment and new crime, as Eddie discovers that lobbying Parliament doesn't feel entirely unlike organised crime
Episode 5: A SUBURBAN A-ROAD ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BASINGSTOKE
Possibly one of the greatest episode titles ever committed to television sees Eddie beaten, buried alive and subjected to what might generously be described as Bobby Glass' immersive executive mentoring programme. Visit Hampshire - bring a shovel.
Episode 6: THE BELLS OF SAN DOMENICO
A gorgeous Italian wedding full of sunshine, gangsters, family, fabulous clothes and let’s not forget some blood. It’s glorious but we’re just waiting for the inevitable bad thing... and when it comes, it properly hurts.
Episode 7: THIS MAD CIRCUS
Halstead Manor effectively becomes Home Alone as armed men descend on the estate and make the spectacularly poor decision to invade somewhere defended by Vinnie Jones. Geoff gets to demonstrate why he’s the baddest ass character in the show.
Episode 8: BRING ME THE HEAD
By the finale Eddie it’s all betrayals, family revelations and the battery-to-bollocks interrogation technique… Eddie can survive this criminal world and it’s getting increasingly nasty... Bring on the chainsaws!?
DARKMATTERS SEASON TWO VERDICT
Season Two is where The Gentlemen goes from being a highly entertaining spin-off to something closer to its own proper crime saga. The stakes are bigger and the locations more exotic, sure, but what really makes it work is that the violence now comes with consequences. Eddie's transformation gives all the Ritchie swagger a poisonous dramatic core because ambition costs him something, power starts demanding payment and the smooth Duke increasingly resembles the sort of person Season One Eddie might have regarded as the problem.
Out of a potential 5 you have to go with a Darkmatters:
ö ö ö ö ö (5 – International gangster-em-up brilliance with extra teeth.)
Awesomeness ööööö – Tigers, Italian mobsters, revenge and Vinnie Jones defending the manor.
Laughs öööö – Still gloriously funny even when everything is going horribly wrong.
Horror öööö – The violence lands harder this time because now we actually care.
Spiritual Enlightenment öö½ – Power corrupts, although apparently it also comes with incredible tailoring.
Theo James gets the Season Two MVP for the subtle way Eddie changes without ever feeling like he's suddenly become another character. The really clever bit isn't watching a good man 'turn bad', it's watching him slowly stop pretending that the qualities required to become a successful gangster weren't already baked into him. Confidence, entitlement, discipline, connections, territorial instinct and the ability to make extremely unpleasant decisions.
Susie is still magnificent though, particularly because she grew up knowing exactly what this world was while Eddie actively chooses it, a distinction that could yet become the fault line which blows the whole partnership apart. Kaya Scodelario's ability to suggest murderous disappointment with approximately half an eyebrow remains one of television's most underappreciated superpowers.
Ray Winstone also gets some properly meaty material as Bobby because he doesn't need to shout, posture or even move very much to remind everyone that the Glass empire exists because he built it. His confrontations with Eddie have the flavour of a veteran predator watching a younger one grow teeth and quietly deciding whether that development should be encouraged or terminated.
And then there's Geoff again, because if civilisation does collapse don't waste your time finding some billionaire survival bunker… find Vinnie Jones. Geoff will already have a Land Rover, six months' food, several firearms, a working generator :)
LONG LIVE THE DUKE?
What I really like about The Gentlemen after these sixteen episodes is that the show hasn't simply settled into endlessly remixing Lock, Stock and Snatch, even though all the familiar Ritchie toys are still present and correct. Underneath the stylish criminal fun there is now a genuinely compelling character story because Eddie is so much fun to watch.
Theo James is brilliant because nothing about Eddie's descent feels wildly out of character. If anything, it feels worryingly natural. The qualities were there all along and the criminal empire merely provided somewhere they could flourish.
Maybe that has always been Ritchie's cheekiest point with The Gentlemen anyway, that the distance between aristocracy and organised crime isn't necessarily as great as either group might like us to believe.
Season Three is coming too, which is excellent news, I hope it’s not too long before we can see Eddie, Susie, Bobby, Geoff and the human IED that is Freddy as a fully dysfunctional criminal dynasty… and I am very much up for seeing just how much worse things can get.
Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...
