I'm just being overdramatic (or I dearly hope I am). One day in the future the movie theaters are going to open again and then I am going to go on a movie spree and watch as many movies in a row as I can.
But until that happens, The Gentlemen will remain the last movie I saw in theater about a year and two months ago (highly unusual for me, normally I go the theater twice a month), exactly one day before the theaters closed for the first lockdown. So let's talk about The Gentlemen.
The easiest and fastest way to describe this movie is to tell people that it's a Guy Ritchie movie. Of course, that only works if people are familiar with Guy Ritchie movies and aware of his style and quirks. A Guy Ritchie movie is British, it's probably about gangsters or outlaws or just generally people with a flexible moral compass, people swear when they open their mouths, there is probably only one (1) major female character but obvious homoeroticism, stylish slow-motion action scenes and highly stylized sequences when characters e.g. are recounting a story or observing something. It's kinda dumb but good fun.
Another way to describe this movie is as a mess of baffling narrative and cinematographic decisions that really shouldn't work but somehow do. The greater part of the movie, for example, is told by a shady journalist to the right-hand-man of a drug lord as an explanation of why he deserves 20 million pounds for not publishing the information he has. It begins, however, with the drug lord in question apparently being shot in a bar.
I liked this movie because I am generally fond of Guy Ritchie's style of storytelling (as I just mentioned in the previous post). I was interested in all of these morally ambiguous characters who all held onto their own carefully-kempt facade of civility that is in danger of slipping always. Charlie Hunnam's second in command to Matthew McConaughey's drug lord (who loves power, prestige, and his wife), is the character I enjoy most, simply because of the calm menace he exudes and the fact that he needs things to be very particular and has to deal with Hugh Grant's shady journalist who absolutely does not care. (Hunnam's character and the drug lord were also an example in my 'crime lord and right-hand-man' post, so yeah.)
I probably have a higher regard for this movie than I would have had if it hadn't been the last movie I experienced in a theater on the last day before the first lockdown but here we are. I have since rewatched it and enjoyed it just as much, so maybe I just like it, you know, no excuses necessary.
Satori over and out
P.S. If the gimmick rap song seems just a bit too good to just be a movie gimmick, it's because the one playing the rapper in the movie is a rapper in real life as well. Just a fun fact.
