Series “The Gentlemen”: “The Gentlemen”: Coke noses in chicken costumes

Primogeniture is a law of feudal succession that has less to do with mere mortals than a cannabis plantation has to do with Buckingham Palace. The first-born gets the most of everything, the next-born gets the most of the leftovers: That’s how it works in Eddie Horniman’s aristocratic clan. Since an ancestor became a duke almost 500 years ago, titles have been passed down to the eldest son from generation to generation. Til today.

At the beginning of the Netflix series “The Gentlemen” a notary reads out the will of the twelfth Duke of Halstead. Contrary to primogeniture, however, it does not declare the ancestor Freddy (Daniel Ings) as the successor, but rather his little brother Eddie (Theo James). Why is clear in two scenes all around: While the latter previously ensures peace as a peacekeeper on the edge of Eastern Europe, the former completely freaks out after the ceremony.

No wonder: thanks to his coke addiction, Freddy is eight million pounds in debt to a Liverpool gangster clan, which he wanted to pay off with his inheritance. With the help of the dubious Susie (Kaya Scodelario), Eddie is able to halve the amount – but at the price of Freddy having to apologize to drug lord Dixon (Peter Serafinowicz) in a chicken costume. It is the beginning of an escalation spiral that picks up speed in the 15th minute and never takes its foot off the accelerator until the 480th.

As usual with Guy Ritchie, whose eight-part film follows the 2019 film of the same name, which he also made, but shifts the focus. While major criminals were more relevant to the plot on the screen, high nobility are on the screen. Because they have their best days behind them even in British society, Eddie’s father does what in Ritchie’s world almost every one of the 28 dukes in the kingdom maintains their standard of living: He leases land to Susie’s business partner, who runs a large cannabis farm there of Buckingham Palace. This brings the 13th Duke of Halstead income, but also trouble, which is why Eddie wants to get rid of her over the course of the series and gets involved in gang criminal activities. As usual, Guy Ritchie is about drug dealers who fight cockfights, in which the stylish sadomasochist celebrates his aesthetic of killing with a cheerfulness that only Quentin Tarantino usually does.

You don’t have to love it, you can even hate it. What you should never do, however, is confuse Guy Ritchie’s lust for carnage, the bloodthirsty mixture of absurdity and originality, coupled with what is currently perhaps the best timing for pent-up expectations with cheap voyeurism for testosterone-saturated action desires à la “The Fast and the Furious”.

Since his breakthrough with “Jack, Queen, King, Grass,” followed by the equally exhilarating diamond heist “Snatch,” the trained music video director has once again become a hunter and collector of bizarre characters, whom he exploits in chamber plays of the lower instincts like infantrymen in war films . Ritchie’s pop-cultural eclecticism likes to breathe new life into characters from similar films and series before they die.

For example, a distinguished drug lord who absolutely wants to buy Eddie’s country estate, Halstead Manor, is consciously played by Giancarlo Esposito, whom Walter White already supplied with crystal meth in “Breaking Bad.” Ritchie, on the other hand, borrowed the snobbish cokehead Freddy from Benedict Cumberbatch’s “Patrick Melrose”. The unwavering crime scene cleaner Felix is ​​a direct descendant of Harvey Keitel’s problem-solver Wolf in “Pulp Fiction,” where the preaching gang boss Gospel (Pearce Quigley) was inspired by Samuel L. Jackson’s Bible-proof killer Jules.

Over the course of eight entertaining hours, they all engage in an outdoing competition of villainy, in which even the upstanding Eddie gets involved – also and especially because he now lets himself be addressed as “Your Grace”. Theo James plays this transition from angel of peace to angel of death, who never hesitates, hesitates or sweats, a little too smoothly, but well – Ritchie doesn’t do reports, but underworld studies in which there is guaranteed to be no dartboard hanging around on the edge of a fight.

Susie, who is as beautiful as she is unscrupulous, states: “Killing is chaos and bad for business,” but “whoever starts the killing must stop the killing.” It begins in the first part of “The Gentlemen” and may not end in the eighth. Continuation urgently desired.

All eight episodes of “The Gentlemen” are available on Netflix.

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