THE GENTLEMEN (US - 2020) Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Hugh Grant, Colin Farrell, Henry Golding, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Marsan, Tom Wu, Bugzy Malone, Jason Wong, Lyne Renee, Chidi Ajufo, Simon Barker, John Dagleish, Eliot Sumner, Samuel West, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, Tom Rhys Harries, Danny Griffin, Mark Rathbone, Andrew Greenaugh. (R, 113 mins) After a decade of playing the big-budget Hollywood franchise game with Robert Downey Jr.'s two SHERLOCK HOLMES films, the underrated THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., the costly flop KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD, and the live-action ALADDIN, writer/director Guy Ritchie returns to his LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS and SNATCH roots with the twisty, convoluted, and wildly entertaining THE GENTLEMEN. He hasn't revisited these sorts of "fookin' 'ell, mate!" British gangster shenanigans since 2008's middling ROCKNROLLA, but buoyed by a game cast and a gleeful willingness to offend everyone, THE GENTLEMEN manages to be a lot of fun despite Ritchie not really having any new tricks up his sleeve. You could call it LOCK, STOCK 4: ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, as Matthew McConaughey stars as expat American Mickey Pearson, who came to London from trailer park America with a genius-level IQ and a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford that he blew off when he found being a weed dealer for his rich and spoiled classmates was more lucrative. And in the years since, he's set up a massive empire in the UK covering all facets from production to distribution. He's incredibly wealthy, has a ton of guys on his payroll to do any required dirty work, and he uses the property of lesser-ranking, under-the-radar royals to secretly house his dozen underground facilities in exchange for a cut of the profits.
But Mickey's been in the game a long time and he wants to retire, which brings everyone out of the woodwork in an attempt to buy out his operation, including unscrupulous American billionaire Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong, reuniting with McConaughey after last year's SERENITY triumph) and Dry Eye (Henry Golding), an ambitious underboss with a Chinese mob outfit who's looking to break away from his boss Lord George (Tom Wu). There's also Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a sleazy private eye who's been hired by tabloid publisher Big Dave (Eddie Marsan) to dig up dirt on Mickey after he's snubbed by him at a swanky society gathering, to the delight of onlookers. And Big Dave knows Mickey has connections to distant Royal Family member Lord Pressfield (Samuel West), whose runaway daughter Laura (Eliot Sumner, youngest daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler) is a heroin addict. But Fletcher has his own ideas of taking the information he's gathered and selling it to Ray (Charlie Hunnam), Mickey's loyal right-hand man, occasionally embellishing his findings with some Hollywood bells and whistles in the hope that it could be sold as a script (Ritchie has some meta fun with this aspect, including a bit where the scheming Fletcher meets with a producer who has a 2015 MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. poster in his office). Double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple crosses ensue, with shifting loyalties and unexpected players--including Mickey's take-no-shit wife Rosalind (Michelle Dockery), and Coach (Colin Farrell), a tough Irish bloke who runs a gym for underprivileged kids, and who's pulled into the proceedings when a few of his ne'er-do-wells foolishly decide to steal some of Mickey's product.
In other words, it's pretty much business as usual for old-school Ritchie fans, but it's done with enough style and panache that you won't mind the familiarity, sort-of like listening to a new AC/DC album. It's exactly what you think it is, it strictly adheres to a carved-in-stone formula, and it doesn't fix what isn't broken (unless you really want Ritchie to make another REVOLVER). It's comfort food of sorts if you're a LOCK, STOCK fan...that is, as long as you can still laugh at insensitive jokes (at the expense of pretty much everyone, for instance Fletcher describing Dry Eye as "a Chinese James Bond...with a ricense to kill") and extraordinarily profane dialogue being rattled off by some very bad guys (this may set a new record for the number of times "cunt" is yelled in a movie). The cast is having a blast, particularly Grant, who seems to be doing a scathing Ricky Gervais impression and keeps not-very-subtly hitting on Hunnam's Ray. An underused Farrell gets a few moments to shine in the de facto Vinnie Jones role, but it's really more of an ensemble piece when it's all said and done, despite the focus on Mickey, and even then, McConaughey is offscreen for a couple of long-ish stretches. Twists and turns pile up at an absurd rate near the end, and THE GENTLEMEN is a really good time if vintage Guy Ritchie is what you're after. He also gives you one of the more blatant shout-outs to THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY that you'll ever see, and that's a nice bonus.
SERENITY (US/UK - 2019) Written and directed by Steven Knight. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Rafael Sayegh, David Butler, Charlotte Butler, Garion Dowds. (R, 106 mins). Steven Knight got an Oscar nomination for scripting 2003's DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, and his many other writing credits include the 2007 David Cronenberg film EASTERN PROMISES. He also earned significant acclaim for 2014's LOCKE, which he also directed. In addition, he's the co-creator of WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? and the creator of the Netflix series PEAKY BLINDERS. He's done hired gun writing gigs on commercial fare like 2015's SEVENTH SON, 2016's ALLIED, and 2018's THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB, but SERENITY, his latest auteur effort, is the kind of shit-the-bed clusterfuck that can completely derail an otherwise successful career. Just ask Martin Brest, the director of BEVERLY HILLS COP and MIDNIGHT RUN whose final film to date is GIGLI. Shot in 2017, SERENITY's release date was bumped a couple of times in the fall of 2018 until upstart Aviron Pictures yanked it from the schedule and saved it for January, an almost certain indicator that something was amiss. Trailers made it look like a BODY HEAT-type noir throwback, which unquestionably would've been preferable to the bait-and-switch that Knight haplessly tries to pull off. The end result feels like an homage to the heyday of the erotic thriller borne of a doomed alliance between James M. Cain, Joe Eszterhas, M. Night Shyamalan, Charlie Brooker, and Jack Daniels, populated by an overqualified cast clearly more intrigued by a paid vacation to scenic Mauritius and South Africa than containing whatever the dumpster fire was that Knight cobbled together on the page.
On Plymouth Island, a tiny, off-the-grid fishing island presumably somewhere in the Caribbean, local fisherman Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) is obsessed with catching a legendary giant tuna that he's named "Justice." When he isn't on his boat with his long-suffering first mate Duke (Djimon Hounsou), he's downing shots at Plymouth's one dive bar and having sweaty afternoon hookups with wealthy divorcee Constance (Diane Lane), who pays him for his services since he's perpetually short on cash. Plymouth is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone's business, and it isn't long before they've all noticed a well-dressed mystery woman who's arrived to meet Baker. She's Karen Zariakis (Anne Hathaway), his high-school sweetheart and ex-wife who knew "Baker Dill" when he went by his real name, John Marsh. She left him when he was serving in Iraq a decade earlier, taking their now-13-year-old son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh) with her. She married the shady and obscenely wealthy Frank Zariakis (Jason Clarke), a violent, vulgar lout who regularly beats and forces himself on her and demands she call him "Daddy." Haunted by PTSD and still bitter that gold-digging Karen abandoned him when he needed her most, Baker, who was so desperate to run from something in his past that he fled to an island in the middle of nowhere and adopted an alias, isn't interested in his ex's sob stories and wants no part of her very lucrative offer: $10 million if she takes Frank out on a fishing excursion and throws him into the shark-infested waters. He declines--for a while, at least-- even after she informs him that Franks's abuse is so relentless that Patrick, a savant-like genius, has locked himself in his room and spends all of his waking hours immersed in a computer game.
In any other movie, the notion of Diane Lane playing a woman who has to pay a man to sleep with her would easily be the most absurdly implausible plot detail. Or that McConaughey (born in 1969) and Hathaway (born in 1982) are supposed to be high-school sweethearts. But Knight is just getting started. What's with the weird, eccentric, persistent salesman (Jeremy Strong) who keeps anxiously running around Plymouth looking for Baker, even turning up outside his shack at 2:30 am in a torrential downpour to sell him fishing equipment? How does Baker have a telepathic communication with Patrick ("He hears you through his computer!" Karen tells him)? How does everyone know Frank is a wife-beater before he even gets to Plymouth? Why is everyone's chief reason for being seemingly to remind Baker "You gotta catch that tuna that's in your head?" You could actually make a drinking game out of every time someone says "Catch that tuna!" which actually might've made a better title than SERENITY (it's the name of Baker's boat). Hathaway makes a convincingly breathless, cooing femme fatale, even with the insipid dialogue Knight's written for her ("We're both the same," she purrs as she seduces Baker, "...damaged but in different ways," as if Knight doesn't trust the audience to draw the same conclusion). All of this is merely foreplay for what's almost certain to go down as the dumbest plot twist of 2019 or possibly even the history of narrative cinema. It might've worked if Knight hadn't telegraphed it so clumsily so early on, but anyone paying attention will figure it out long before Baker does, even if you initially dismiss your gut feeling, thinking "There's absolutely no fucking way an Oscar-nominated writer like Steven Knight is gonna pull something that stupid out of his ass." Oh, but he does! With its gaping plot holes, its jaw-dropping resolution guaranteed to leave you somewhere between thoroughly dumbfounded and utterly enraged, its idiotic dialogue, its squandering of Lane in a frivolous supporting role that's far beneath her, and the ludicrous amounts of self-indulgent McConaughey nudity and his third-act, Nic Cage-channeling histrionics, SERENITY is so bad that it almost demands to be seen with a large and increasingly hostile audience collectively losing its patience. I didn't get to experience that, as I had the entire theater to myself for a Monday matinee screening. Apparently, the word's gotten out.
