British Telly

Ritchie’s latest venture into ultraviolence and subjunctives comes via his new Netflix series The Gentlemen, a spin-off from his film, also called The Gentlemen. That the film generated a TV show is in itself a surprise because the movie was, how can I put this, explicably overlooked during Oscar season.

Anyway, viewers can once again revel in arch sentence structure, menacing syntax and the exaggerated use of posh first names. Hence a Ritchie thug might look up from dismembering a corpse to wonder, “Are you familiar with the Hobbesian concept of the Leviathan, Rupert?”

The characters are essentially what we’d expect if Russell Brand decided to take up armed robbery. “You will of course be aware of Proudhon’s theory of asset management, Basil. Now stick that cash in the bag before I remind you of Sun Tzu’s theories on irresistible force.” 

Sometimes they correct one another’s grammar: “It’s not an hatchet, it’s a hatchet. The ‘h’ is pronounced, you see, rendering the ‘an’ otiose. If you get my drift, Cornelius.”

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What distinguishes the Ritchie/Tarantino dialogue is the conflation of the coarse and the refined in largely working-class villains, who maintain the poise of an Oxford Union debater while knee-deep in blood. This, after all, is a world that turns to Vinnie Jones for gravitas. We are witnessing the nobility of the gangster, as bestowed upon them by public-school manners. That’s the joke, and it was funny for a while.