If you’ve never seen The Gentlemen, writer/director Guy Ritchie’s spin-off from his own 2019 movie, you really should go back to the first episode of season one, which dropped on Netflix in 2024.
That hour-long opener is one of the high points of Ritchie’s career, a taut miniature comedy thriller packed with ideas, where every scene is pure fun: the closing shot, of drug-addled toff Freddy Horniman (Daniel Ings) swaying across a stately home’s impeccable lawn, waving a recently discharged shotgun and wearing a chicken costume, is a Best of Guy Ritchie in one image.
In the pilot, suave and capable soldier Eddie Horniman (Theo James) returned to England upon the death of his father, the Duke of Halstead, to learn that Pater had deviated from the usual tradition of leaving everything to the firstborn son, on account of his firstborn being Freddy, the aforementioned feather-clad screw-up.
Eddie inherited the family mansion and the dukedom instead, and quickly learnt that the house came with an unexpected extra: a gigantic underground cannabis farm, run by incarcerated weed kingpin Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) and his lieutenant in the field, his daughter Susie (Kaya Scodelario).
Refusing to settle for the existing arrangement where the Horniman estate received bundles of cash in return for silent co-operation, Eddie involved himself in the drugs business and, across a first season that more or less maintained the momentum of the debut episode, Eddie and Susie became trusted business partners, seeing off threats to their empire while completing side quests involving naughty villains, roguish wrong’uns and cartoonish criminals, all of whom succumbed to Eddie’s ingenuity and Susie’s hard pragmatism.
As it returns for a second run, though, The Gentlemen looks like it might have gone stale. The new palaver lacks swagger, which is the one thing a Guy Ritchie production is meant to have: the first half of the season has three or four plot arcs, none of which it wants to fully invest in, and although it’s not totally devoid of larky set pieces, generally it’s what a show like this should never be: tentative and slow.
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Eddie gets involved, for reasons that flash by unconvincingly and ultimately don’t matter, with an Italian mafia boss and his daughter; Freddy languishes in rehab; Eddie and Susie infiltrate the Houses of Parliament in order to influence the vote on a bill to decriminalise cannabis. The last of those strands brings Hugh Bonneville to the cast for an enjoyable turn – his startled bouffant hair is endlessly amusing – as dissolute peer of the realm Lord Hawthorne.
Mild capering ensues but, with Eddie apparently suffering some form of PTSD following a hit with even murkier ethics than usual, everything’s muffled and subdued. It doesn’t help that The Gentlemen has acquired an odd, grandiose house style when it comes to dialogue: the whole point of Giancarlo Esposito’s character, eccentric American plutocrat Stanley Johnston, is that he talks in the florid language of a wannabe English aristocrat, but that malaise has seeped into the rest of the cast: everyone talks like a repressed 1930s butler.
Even Susie, who is meant to be a top geezer’s tough-talking enforcer, won’t simply say “yes” when she can say “that would be an accurate description” instead.
You shouldn’t ever have to be patient with a show like The Gentlemen – you should be entertained by every scene. Be patient, however, and the second half of season two reveals that all this aimless noodling has a point to it, and as the strands tie together the story takes on a darker, harder edge, with proper stakes, real consequences and another closing image that grotesquely spoofs the shot of Freddy as a chicken.
The Gentlemen is still alive. But it’s lost its cheeky grin.
The Gentlemen season 2 is streaming now on Netflix. You can sign up to Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky TV and Virgin Media.
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