Gentlemanly warfare: Guy Ritchie’s gangster etiquette in 8 films and 2 TV shows
The British filmmaker has given us a pantheon of fascinating characters in his crime movies, with manners both gentlemanly and ungentlemanly
Film Features Films
Guy Ritchie’s two-and-a-half-decade career as a filmmaker has been a bit of a mixed bag, and that’s being generous. No one really wants to be pigeonholed, but the fact is that some artists are especially suited to one particular genre, and they do their best work when they stick to it. For Ritchie, that genre is quintessentially British crime capers. Since launching his career with the one-two punch that was Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch (released in 1998 and 2000), Ritchie has dabbled in rom-coms (or whatever Swept Away was supposed to be), period pieces, mysteries, and even a live-action Disney remake. His most recent film, The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is part war film, part spy thriller. But none of those projects (including his latest) have managed to match the entertainment value of his sporadic jaunts through London’s criminal underworld.
One of the reasons why it’s so much fun to visit the worlds Ritchie takes us to in films like RocknRolla, Wrath Of Man, and The Gentlemen (as well as the recent Netflix spinoff) is that he populates them with plenty of interesting characters. Ritchie’s “Mockney” protagonists may be gangsters, crime lords, swindlers, or petty thieves, but we tend to like them and root for them, because they have a code. Those who keep to their code are the most likely to survive to the final credits; those who don’t often come to violent ends. As evidenced by the number of recent Ritchie titles referencing “gentlemen,” he seems to have his own ideas about what constitutes etiquette and civility, and they have nothing to do with the station into which his characters were born.
With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting to look back at Ritchie’s crime oeuvre and put together a guide to gangster etiquette according to Guy Ritchie. For the sake of expediency, we’re excluding his broader fare like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as well as period films like King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword, and Aladdin, but we are throwing in Sherlock Holmes and its sequel. Because hey, these rules may be inspired by Ritchie’s films, but we’re the ones making them up as we go.
8 Comments
I’m no fan of his films generally but the Sherlock ones are pretty great.
I remain impressed by Ritchie’s Sherlock movies; seen them a bunch of times. In the stories, Holmes was, in fact, pretty physical, or could be, so the movies work for me, a sort-of-Holmes-purist. They’re pretty funny too.Oh, and Ritchie’s Man from UNCLE is goddamn near perfect and he should have done a mess of sequels.
I’m not a huge Ritchie fan, but I loved Snatch. It had so many fun quotable lines. One of my favorites was Vinnie’s incredulous “… because he dodges bullets, Avi!” to Avi’s Captain Obvious question.
Really enjoying The Gentlemen Netflix show so far. It’s fun to watch Vinnie quietly patroling around. I’m only a few episodes in so far and waiting to see when he finally gets to do some violence. Anyway, surprised “never trust a man with a pig farm” wasn’t one of the articulated rules here.
I agree, it’s fantastic watching Vinnie Jones, because he’s playing a different sort of character here – he’s not quite the ‘ard man, he’s more quiet, reserved, loyal, and capable. I did try watching it, but there’s a very un-Ritchie like mechanism they’re using to propel it forward – it’s where you can see that he didn’t write it:It’s the older brother. Ritchie films, for me, have been distinguished by having a group of fairly competent working towards goals that are at odds with one another – which is where the tension comes from. It’s circumstances outside the individuals’ control. The brother in The Gentleman is just lazy writing, a chaos agent because the writers needed an easy way to create tension. It’s a very “lol random!” sort of writing. It feels like that old Far Side cartoon…“Hey, you got an idea for this epsiode?”“Well, how about we have Eddie try to do something again, then Freddy comes in and completely shits all over it again, then Susie comes in and fixes everything again?”“I like it!”Like Endora, he’s a character kept around for…reasons of driving the plot forward and creating tension, even though it would be within the best interests of the characters – and within their powers – to get rid of them. Like Endora, he’s just irritating, not interesting. Instead of machinations of the Scousers and Giancarlo Esposito working against Eddie and Susie, and the countermoves they must make, it’s now just “lol, Freddy did something stupid, lol! Bet you didn’t see that coming, despite the fact we’ve done it fourteen times before!”Best thing to do would be to quietly take Freddy out the back, and shoot him.
The younger brother Eddie has that Jon Snow energy — quiet, rugged confidence that’ll get him shot in the face as he blunders into a world he can’t possibly understand. (Maybe I’m biased — to be honest, I find him really boring.)Freddy seems like, for all his nonsense, he’s the one more likely to make it through (and learn something in the process).I’m still watching it, anyway, so no idea what’s going to happen. (No spoilers, please.)
And Aladdin? What did we learn from that?
Not a damn thing.