The swaggering second-born son of a duke unexpectedly inherits the whole shebang upon his father’s death and discovers a secret hydroponic pot farm on the estate in Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen” on Netflix.
The marijuana operation nets the family five million a year. But Eddie (Theo James) wants out. The only hitch? He’s just been informed that his loser cokehead older brother Freddy (Daniel Ings) owes several million to a drug cartel.
Enter the efficient and practical services of Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario), who heads up the pot empire on the property and offers a solution thanks to her expert negotiating skills. Things don’t go as planned. Of course they don’t, Freddy is involved. Chaos ensues. Cleaners are needed. And Eddie is now roped into a life of crime, unspooling in each episode like a heist-filled thrill ride. Despite his protestations, maybe he likes it. “There are 24 dukes in this country, this seems to be the only one that can navigate the upper echelons of high society and shoot someone in the head without worrying about it,” someone says of his particular skill set.
The eight-episode series is a spinoff of Ritchie’s 2019 film of the same name and it follows his trademark ratio of humor to violence. When we first meet Eddie, he’s working as a UN peacekeeping soldier who displays a talent for smoothly de-escalating things to keep the day moving. That expertise will come in handy as he and Susie find themselves pinballing from one explosive or merely puzzling situation to the next. It’s more entertaining than I expected. Eddie is barely a character, and James isn’t the kind of actor to infuse him with much more than an appealing savoir-faire, but Scodelario’s performance is the real stuff. Her hair and makeup are a throwback to the 60s, giving her the vibe of Emma Peel in “The Avengers,” with her formidable style and a flair for crisis management. She is unflappable. When she finally does lose her cool, it’s not a scenery-chewing moment but one with angry tears brimming in her eyes.
The estate has been in the family since 1550, but Freddy’s money problems could put an abrupt end to that. A sophisticated and exceedingly motivated billionaire played by Giancarlo Esposito has his eye on the place. “Why don’t you allow me to provide the keys to free yourself from your inherited legacy?” he says silkily. Eddie considers it briefly. But the presence of the pot farm complicates everything.
Freddy has always been the failson, with Eddie saying his neck time and again, enabling his bad choices out of a sense of questionable fraternal duty. “I didn’t ask for any of this,” Eddie tells him after the will is read. “The title has no practical value, the business is broke, there are holes in the roof, the government is greedy, the payroll is ugly, the staff are revolting and you are a coke-sniffing (so-and-so).”
Freddy offers a silent response that is the equivalent of “well, true,” and it’s a priceless reaction from Ings. Together they are the Brothers Dim, even if Eddie is smart and capable and decent enough. But they are men who move through the world as if it were made for them (they’re not wrong) and their childish nicknames — Fredward and Edwina — feel very much in line with their tedious, aristo-bred sense of humor. Apparently their shared heritage also includes a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow.
Filling out their world is the stalwart groundskeeper (wonderfully underplayed by Vinnie Jones) who takes in wounded animals — a small but funny detail — and he has some intriguing history with the lady of the house (Joely Richardson), who is so calm you wonder if she’s swallowing fistfuls of benzos. Both offer advice and counsel to Eddie as he attempts to keep their stately status quo from blowing apart.
Another important player is Susie’s dad (Ray Winstone), who is pulling strings from inside the cushiest prison imaginable. He’s a real strategist and his scenes are a highlight of the season, which in hindsight feels like a very drawn-out but highly entertaining origin story setting up the show’s inevitable renewal.
Enjoyable, riproarious and surprisingly elegant, “The Gentlemen” is also more wealth-aganda. Do we not have enough TV series about the lives of the rich and discontented? Exhausted by their misadventures, Freddy asks: “Can we please just go back to the quiet life?” His brother puts a different question to him: When you say “the quiet life,” did you ever wonder where the money came from? “Dunno,” Freddy shrugs, “slavery?” This might be the only show about British aristocrats in recent memory to actually say the thing. The joke, of course, isn’t on them, but on anyone naive enough to think these two would even care. I suppose the larger point holds: Crimes against humanity made those English fortunes possible. A title can’t erase that nasty truth. And now the family is in the drug business, and so what? It’s no sordid than their previous sources of wealth.
But “The Gentlemen” doesn’t want you to dwell on this. Why ruin a good time? Eddie is the sympathetic protagonist you will be rooting for by any narrative means necessary. By hook or by crook. Definitely by crook.
“The Gentlemen” — 3 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: Netflix
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
