When people recommend a Guy Ritchie movie, Sherlock Holmes is usually one of the first titles that comes up. It’s an understandable choice. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law have terrific chemistry, the action is inventive, and the movies introduced Ritchie’s signature style to audiences who had never seen Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. These movies are still among his most entertaining movies, but if the goal is to recommend the movie that best represents Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking, Sherlock Holmes isn’t actually the right answer: it’s The Gentlemen.
Released in 2019, The Gentlemen is the culmination of everything Ritchie had spent more than two decades refining. It has the layered storytelling of his early crime movies, the confidence of his blockbuster work, and what may be the strongest ensemble cast of his career. More importantly, it’s one of those increasingly rare movies that gets better every time you watch it, because it has one of the best ensemble casts Ritchie has ever put on screen.
Charlie Hunnam Is the Movie’s Secret Weapon
Charlie Hunnam as Raymond and Colin Farrell as Coach looking into a car trunk in The Gentlemen.Image via STXfilms
For a movie filled with scene-stealing performances, The Gentlemen‘s biggest strength might actually be its quietest one. Charlie Hunnam‘s Raymond doesn’t have Hugh Grant‘s outrageous monologues or Colin Farrell‘s instantly quotable one-liners, but he doesn’t need to. Raymond is the character holding the entire movie together, and Hunnam plays him with a confidence that’s almost effortless. Every other major player is trying to manipulate someone, intimidate someone, or prove they’re the smartest person in the room, but the reality is, it’s always Ray. Because of that imbalance, Ray spends the entirety of the movie trying to clean up other people’s messes (Mickey’s).
In another actor’s hands, Raymond could have disappeared into the background. Instead, Hunnam becomes the calm center of complete chaos. He gives everyone else room to go bigger without casting a shadow over him. It’s also one of the most underrated performances of Hunnam’s career. Conversations about the actor usually revolve around Sons of Anarchy or more recently, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, but Ray deserves to be mentioned alongside them as an example of the caliber of Hunnam’s work.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Guy Ritchie Has Rarely Had a Better Cast
As great as Hunnam is, The Gentlemen only works because everyone around him is operating at the same level. Matthew McConaughey gives what may be the coolest performance of his career as Mickey Pearson. He never overplays the role, which would have been easy to do.Grant reinvents himself as Fletcher, turning what could have been a straightforward exposition character into one of the funniest and most entertaining people Ritchie has ever put on screen. Then there’s Farrell, who walks away with several of the movie’s most memorable moments as Coach. Michelle Dockery makes Rosalind every bit as intimidating as her husband, Henry Golding brings genuine swagger to Dry Eye, and Jeremy Strong is hilarious as the hopelessly outmatched Matthew Berger.
Plenty of movies have impressive casts, but very few have casts where every single actor feels perfectly matched to the movie they’re making. That’s one of the biggest reasons The Gentlemen becomes even more entertaining on repeat viewings. Once the twists are no longer the focus, you can begin to appreciate how perfectly the cast work off of one another.
‘The Gentlemen’ Is Ritchie at His Best
‘The Gentlemen’Image via Entertainment Film Distributors
One of the reasons Sherlock Holmes became such a hit is because it successfully translated Ritchie’s style into a blockbuster franchise. The Gentlemen does something even better by stripping away the expectations of adapting an iconic character and letting Ritchie focus on the kind of story he has always told best. The movie has the layered plotting that made Snatch a classic, memorable criminals who all feel distinct from one another, and dialogue that manages to sound clever without feeling like it’s trying too hard. Every subplot pays off, every conversation pushes the story forward, and the movie never overstays its welcome.
That’s what makes it such a perfect late-night watch. It doesn’t ask the audience to solve an impossible mystery or sit through an overly complicated crime saga. Instead, it delivers exactly what Ritchie has always done best: sharp dialogue, charismatic criminals, memorable performances, and two hours of pure entertainment. Sherlock Holmes may be the movie that introduced many people to Ritchie, but The Gentlemen is the movie that best captures why audiences became fans of his filmmaking in the first place.
