As the spare heir, Eddie Halstead is left astounded after inheriting the title and the estate of the Duke of Halstead, but he learns that while he’s been away, his recently deceased father kept a secret hiding under the 15,000 acres left to him.
The take
After the successful release of The Gentlemen (2019), it would have been easy to just continue the story with the same cast of characters, but instead Guy Ritchie makes a spinoff with the same cannibis chaos, but instead expands it to a startlingly funny depiction of the British aristocracy and the criminal underworld. It has all the action-packed styling Ritchie is known for, with each episode bringing up a new inheritance issue Theo James as Eddie Halstead has to solve, with the help of a cool and cunning Kara Scodelario. While the episodic troubles do feel a bit tired after eight long episodes, The Gentlemen keeps the intrigue through never losing sight of the tension occurring between the main duo.
What stands out
Theo James and Kara Scodelario wasn’t a pairing I expected, but there’s a subtle chemistry in the droll way they interact with each other that forms tension with their conflicting desires, with Scodelario leading James deeper into the criminal underworld, while James tries to minimize the collateral damage.