The Gentlemen Review: Two Seasons In, This Is Guy Ritchie at His Best

The Gentlemen is an 8/10 because it does the hardest thing in television comedy-crime: it stays fun without going soft. Across the 2024 first season and this September’s Italy-flavoured second, Netflix’s series version of Guy Ritchie’s world has turned out to be the best vehicle his particular brand of posh-criminal mayhem has had in years, the long-film included.

The double act is the engine

Theo James and Kaya Scodelario are the reason the show works. James plays Eddie Horniman’s slide from reluctant aristocrat to willing operator with exactly the right amount of self-awareness: a man who keeps telling himself the next deal is the way out while visibly enjoying the way in. Scodelario’s Susie Glass is the show’s spine, all controlled menace and better judgement, and the series is smart enough never to force their partnership into a shape it does not need. Every episode where the two of them negotiate, improvise or quietly clean up a disaster together is the show at full strength.

Around them, Ritchie’s machinery hums. The dialogue has the trademark rhythm, the violence arrives with punchline timing, and the plotting does the thing his best films do: every scheme spawns two complications, and every complication has a personality. The twists land often enough that even the ones you see coming are fun to watch arrive.

Season 2 raises the stakes without losing the tone

The second season picks up a year after Eddie and Susie seize Bobby Glass’s empire and sends the operation abroad, with a stretch of the season set around Lake Maggiore. The postcard scenery could have diluted the show’s very English menace; instead the contrast sharpens it, and Ray Winstone’s Bobby, making increasingly erratic calls from the margins, gives the season a ticking instability the first year lacked. The new additions, Hugh Bonneville among them, slot into the gallery of dangerous eccentrics without unbalancing it.

It is darker than Season 1, as promised, but the tone holds. This is still a show where a catastrophe and a quip arrive in the same breath, and that balance is precisely what the 2019 film only managed in stretches.

Where it dips

Both seasons share the same two weaknesses. The first is a saggy middle: around the halfway point, each run spends an episode or two shuffling pieces, and the momentum that makes the openings and finales so watchable briefly drains away. The second is the supporting bench. Beyond the leads and one or two standouts, the side characters are sketches, vivid in the moment, thin on return visits. Daniel Ings’ Freddy remains the honourable exception, a liability so consistently well played that the show keeps finding new uses for him, but too many others exist to deliver one scheme and vanish.

Neither flaw is fatal, because the show never asks its margins to carry weight. But a series this confident with its leads should be able to build a deeper world around them, and two seasons in, it still has not quite done it.

Verdict

An 8/10 and an easy recommendation. If you bounced off Guy Ritchie’s recent films, the series format is the correction: room for the schemes to breathe, a double act worth following, and a tone that two seasons have not managed to break. Ritchie when he is at his best, which has not been something you could say this reliably for a long time.