Guy Ritchie of Snatch has never been better

Guy Ritchie is a more dexterous filmmaker than people give him credit for. Sure, all his films are similar in spirit – kinetic action flicks with a wry sense of ultra-British humour, but his skill comes down to knowing which element of his style needs to be emphasized for each particular project. Just last year he released two films, The Covenant and Operation Fortune, with completely different tones – Operation Fortune skewing more towards screwball comedy, and The Covenant an excellent and serious look at the tensions of wartime bureaucracy. But while he appreciates all that flexibility in filmmaking, his fantastic new series on Netflix, The Gentlemen, allows Ritchie to return to his British crime roots and refine the vibes he does best.

Despite sharing the same title as a previous Ritchie film, The Gentlemen is not exactly a direct sequel or remake of the film. Instead, it's more spiritually connected specifically via the links between drugs, boxing and British dynastic wealth – three things Ritchie has always seemed fascinated by as an artist.

The series follows Eddie (Theo James), an ex-soldier who is pulled out of the military when his father dies so he can take over his dukedom, which his father handed down to him instead of his older brother. While the title itself is a surprise, the bigger shock comes when Eddie discovers that his seemingly law-abiding father had been leasing his land to a drug empire for the past few years, a business venture Eddie is keen to extricate the family as quickly as possible. as possible. Something he can of course only do by committing quite a few crimes in the process.