The Gentlemen (2020)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
No · Ultra Based
How we score movies →Consciousness Markers
The film demonstrates a troubling racial consciousness through its deployment of racist slurs, anti-Semitic references, and ethnic stereotypes presented as comedy. Critics noted the casual racism and anti-Semitic undertones, suggesting a film that engages with racial material in deeply problematic ways.
While the cast includes actors of color like Henry Golding and Tom Wu, they are portrayed through racist stereotypes and ethnic caricatures. Their presence represents diversity in appearance only, not in how they are written or treated by the narrative.
While the film employs meta-narrative framing and some self-aware commentary through its structure and character narration, it remains primarily an entertainment-focused crime comedy without significant preachy intent.
Michelle Dockery appears in the cast but the film remains overwhelmingly male-centered. Her character functions within a male-dominated criminal narrative without meaningful engagement with feminist themes or perspectives.
The narrative celebrates a successful criminal entrepreneur's wealth accumulation and business acumen. The film is fundamentally pro-capitalist, treating criminal enterprise as a legitimate business endeavor worthy of admiration.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or representation present in the film.
No environmental themes or climate-related content in the film.
No body positivity themes or representation present in the film.
No representation of neurodivergent characters or engagement with neurodivergence themes.
The film contains no historical revisionism or reinterpretation of historical events.
Synopsis
American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he's looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.
Why it received this score
Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen" arrives as a cocaine-fueled fever dream of a Guy Ritchie film, which is to say it exhausts itself attempting to prove that reflexive self-awareness about its own trashiness constitutes artistic merit. The narrative follows Mickey Pearson, a self-made American drug lord navigating the criminal underworld of London, as various predators circle to devour his empire. The film traffics in a particular brand of lazy provocateurism, deploying racial slurs and ethnic caricatures with the confidence of someone who believes that saying racist things within a criminal comedy framework somehow inoculates them against charges of racism. The portrayal of Chinese gang members, Jewish characters, and various ethnic stereotypes suggests a filmmaker working from a 1990s playbook, indifferent to the notion that casual dehumanization might not age well.
The cast performs with the energy of actors who have read the script and made peace with their choices. Matthew McConaughey inhabits the role of the charming criminal entrepreneur with professional competence, while Hugh Grant's turn as a sleazy tabloid operator provides occasional moments of genuine comic timing. The film's structure, which layers multiple narrative perspectives and plot threads with Ritchie's characteristic kinetic editing, occasionally achieves a kind of chaotic momentum. Yet the underlying cynicism about human nature and society reads as adolescent rather than insightful. The film celebrates wealth accumulation and criminal enterprise without irony or consequence, treating the drug trade as a business problem to be solved rather than a social harm to be examined. This is not social consciousness. This is aesthetic emptiness dressed up in designer labels.
The film's box office performance (36.5 million domestic, 115.2 million worldwide) indicates that audiences found sufficient entertainment value in Ritchie's particular blend of violence, vulgarity, and visual flair. Yet commercial success does not redeem the film's fundamental disinterest in anything beyond its own stylistic flourishes. What remains is a movie that mistakes provocation for profundity and treats human dignity as just another plot device to be discarded when the narrative demands it. The film exists in a strange temporal pocket, neither sufficiently smart for its intellectual pretensions nor sufficiently entertaining for its commercial ambitions.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Critic Reviews
“The Gentlemen never ceases to surprise and amuse.”
“But like he seems to do with every project these days, Grant runs away with the movie. ”
“The dialogue, the violence, the humor (largely provided by Grant’s character) and the intricacy of the storytelling make for a picture in which most everyone in it seems to be having a great deal of chatty, bloody fun.”
“It was written with empty-headed desperation and directed with minimal imagination by Guy Ritchie, one of the most incompetent filmmakers of the century.”