Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t watch a pair of episodes in which a woman hacks a man to death with a machete and a machine-gun battle over the future of Hitler’s testicle gets decided with a vintage hand grenade and say the television show in question is taking its foot off the gas a bit. After all, either event would be the most exciting thing that ever happened in, I don’t know, This Is Us. But this is The Gentlemen we’re talking about here, and in its first two episodes, writer-director Guy Ritchie set the mayhem bar pretty high.
But if the show’s third and fourth outings don’t clear that bar, they glide pretty confidently right underneath it. The main issue is simply a structural one. The first two episodes were one long daisy chain of escalating close calls, narrow escapes, and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat (only to be dropped immediately into a new, larger pair of jaws), connected by the Freddy shotgun-murder cliffhanger. These are the kinds of tricks Breaking Bad and even Ozark used to keep things cooking.
By comparison, “Where’s My Weed At?” and “An Unsympathetic Gentlemen” are more episodic in nature. Sure, our heroes’ adventures in both are connected by their deepening, evolving business relationship, as well as by an unknown player using a good old-fashioned honeytrap to get the dirt on their operation. But the two capers are otherwise self-contained, almost villain-of-the-week affairs.
I reviewed episodes three and four of The Gentlemen for Vulture.
Tags: reviews, the gentlemen, TV, TV reviews, vulture