‘The Gentlemen’ Review: Theo James Stars in a Guy Ritchie Netflix Series That Diverts but Never Dazzles

When Eddie Horniman (Theo James) first gets into the weed business, it’s not because he wants to. It’s because he’s just inherited his father’s estate, along with the criminal pact that’s secretly funded it all these years, and because he sees no other choice to pay off the astronomical debt that his big brother (Daniel Ings) owes to bloodthirsty cocaine dealers. Thus Eddie dives into the illegal-drug industry out of a sense of obligation, rather than out of any real eagerness to break bad.

The show he’s in, Guy Ritchie‘s The Gentlemen, similarly feels like the dutiful product of a prior commitment. Like Eddie, the series tries to deliver what’s expected of it, and like Eddie, it more or less gets the job done. But where Eddie very quickly discovers he’s uniquely suited for the gig he never wanted, the action dramedy only occasionally brushes up against its full potential. It’s a decent bit of distraction that never becomes a fully engrossing piece of entertainment.

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Though it’s billed as a spinoff of the 2019 movie, also directed by Ritchie, Netflix’s The Gentlemen makes little reference to the events of that film and brings back none of the same characters. But it’s set in the same England, where the countryside is positively littered with ancient estates that double as a vast secret network of underground marijuana farms. And it’s adorned with the usual Guy Ritchie bag of tricks. There’s slow-motion and speed-ramping and playing about with time in general; this show loves to cut away from a dramatic moment only to cheekily circle back later. Bright captions explain British street slang or map out the characters’ schemes. Conversations tend to happen in snappy banter or dramatic monologues laden with jungle metaphors.

But if you were wondering how an eight-hour season could possibly keep up the zippy energy of Ritchie’s two-hour crime capers, The Gentlemen suggests maybe it can’t. While the series goes through the motions, its heart doesn’t fully seem to be in them. In his most entertaining works, Ritchie’s flourishes create an air of such cool that it becomes the whole point: It hardly matters if the story or characters are all that deep when the vibes are this fun. Here, though, they’re deployed so perfunctorily that they become distractions. Bits of nonlinear storytelling feel like halfhearted attempts to spice up an uninspired plot, or to remind a half-attentive audience of what they’ve just seen. A few characters make a memorable impression, among them Vinnie Jones as an animal-loving groundskeeper and Michael Vu as a disarmingly sweet (and perpetually stoned) grower. But aristocratic Eddie is so smooth and slick he comes off as a blank slate.

Indeed, a whole lot of The Gentlemen plays as a fainter echo of its predecessor. (Sometimes for the best — certainly, the decrease in casual anti-Asian racism is welcome.) Instead of tracksuit-clad toughs forcing a man to have sex with a pig, we get tracksuit-clad toughs forcing a man to act like a chicken. Instead of a poisoned foe projectile-vomiting, we have a poisoned foe huffing and turning red. Gnarly as some of those earlier choices might have been, they were designed to provoke a reaction. The TV versions are the tamer swings of someone who just wants to, as Eddie derides his upper-crust peers for doing, “[take] the money and [roll] over like a good little boy.”

The do-over in The Gentlemen that improves on the original is the one that doubles down on its potential instead of shrinking from it. Susie Glass, the crime boss Eddie reports to, is essentially a carbon copy of Michelle Dockery’s Rosalind, from her cherry-red lips to her sky-high stilettos to her generally imperturbable air. But Kaya Scodelario, as a co-lead, gets far more room to shade in the character’s nuances than Dockery ever did. She carries the show with a dry confidence, and even James brightens in her presence — especially once plot machinations in the second half of the series threaten to upend their reluctant partnership for good.

All of this makes her an ideal anchor for what turns out, amusingly, to be a story about the familiar headaches of running a business. Susie works for a boss (her father, played by Ray Winstone) who does not appreciate her vision, and alongside a hotshot new hire (i.e., Eddie) who has his own ideas about how things should be run. The plot of most episodes consists of Susie and Eddie flitting from one meeting to the next, trying to sort out distribution-chain problems or placate angry customers. It’s just that in their violent world, the solutions might involve stealing a Lamborghini or cozying up to a meth kingpin (played by Giancarlo Esposito as, basically, Gus Fring with a much bigger bank account).

When The Gentlemen leans into that irony, it’s almost relatable. Following a particularly trying meeting, Susie recounts what happened to a colleague: “There were some minor disagreements about the deal structure, but Eddie here proved himself remarkably capable at arbitration. After the inevitable to-ing and fro-ing, we managed to iron out terms that were acceptable to all parties.” The joke is that her explanation plays over a flashback of Susie and Eddie engaging in a shootout with a Nazi in a secret underground tunnel.

But her summary isn’t wrong, exactly. For all of Eddie’s skill at beating up bad guys, his true value is as a well-connected businessman. By the end of the season, even he’s come around to realizing that lording over a drug empire might be his true calling in life. If only The Gentlemen seemed as excited about that prospect as he does.