"The Gentlemen" Review

Guy Ritchie has returned to his story-telling roots with "The Gentlemen," a bombastic and fast-paced London gangster film. The lead character is Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), a kingpin of a marijuana empire he built from the ground up while studying overseas in London. He plans to sell off his business to Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong) for the right price. Things go awry, and it's not long before Mickey and his band of employees are running around the city trying to keep the deal intact.

One of the most notable developments in Guy Ritchie's style since he last forayed into London gangster stories ("RocknRolla" was released in 2008) is his visual flair and style. All of the characters are sharply dressed by costume designer Michael Wilkinson who is known to many for his work on the costumes for DCEU superheroes. Ritchie has been developing an affinity for fashion for several years now, as noted by the hilarious bickering of Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (2015) and Ritchie's own discussion of fashion in various promotional interviews. To have such an apologetically metrosexual band of characters in the gangster genre is highly refreshing.

Ritchie's filmmaking style has also grown increasingly flamboyant since his early days of London gangster films. Once he moved into making larger scale films with higher budgets, he began to develop more of the technical knowledge that comes with working on such projects. Though Ritchie has always been fond of building his films in the post-production editing, the scale of this has increased considerably in "The Gentlemen" which should delight anyone with an affinity for dramatic visuals.

Watch the full review of Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen" here: