In 1998, young filmmaker Guy Ritchie was the coolest cat in the movie scene. His debut debut with Lock, stock and two smoking barrels, a British local colored action sucker with attitude, suggested that here came the future with fast cuts, tough but right customer stumps and crazy forward movement.

I had already tired of his second film, Snatch, created along the same concept (now though with bigger names on the cast). An overcompensating self-awareness, a "coolness" that only became silly and stressful. And then we forgot about Guy Ritchie. Well, he is still successful but mostly as a capable director of blockbusters like Sherlock Holmes, The man from UNCLE and most recently the live-action version of Aladdin (the one with Will Smith).

But now he is back on his mother's street in a boast of a clearly disorganized organized crime in an England where, in this version, the old power representatives (nobility, politicians, media) are forced to play by the criminal rules. Russian, Chinese, American and old honorable British mafia beams together in a brownish tinge that forces me to bring out the old cliché "helpless".

Matthew McConaughey is leading a celeb ensemble here, playing himself the highest hen, an American of self-elected British exile, who, through the decades, has climbed to the top of the criminal food chain, but now plans to sell his entire extensive marijuana industry to the highest bidder. The idea is to live peacefully and well for the rest of life, along with the cold-hammered wife (Michelle Dockery), but it is not entirely unexpected on the contrary.

Thus, Ritchie no longer fakes about retailers who, in their debut, have now taken up the criminal hierarchy and his role figures have matured with him. The pace is still high, the blood flow about the same but the attitude has matured. Something. The craziness is at least easily diluted with a shade of thought. Enough for the movie to grow in front of my extremely skeptical eyes in the beginning.

Or as one of the many significant co-players, The coach (a cockney-hardy handsomely edited by Colin Farrel) says: When you come of age you are not cowardly with a knife and gun, you do it with the brain (which iofs does not stop him from to pick up the buffer sometimes).
Now one should not expect any intellectual outbursts, but this mix of very catchy humor, intricate intrigues and, above all, a clever dialogue, undoubtedly entertains for the moment.

Like his American genre cousin Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie (and co-screenwriters) let the processing of the language play a major role, as a definition of characters or just as petty entertainment. These are gangsters who have very little to do with reality criminals. Violent and addictive, of course, but with intellect as sharp as their wardrobe and vocabulary. The gentleman, quite simply, although Horace Engdahl might not sign that it is a correct epithet.

Still, the best value for invested time in the salon is Hugh Grant, who makes a private detective with extremely well-lubricated mouthfeel and red-tinted glasses, who can be said to be our small-robed ciceron through the winding story. To say the least, an odd role for the old Roman comic.
But why all these sex insinuations / jokes about Grant's gay character? Half fun for the first time (barely), boyish in the long run. Feels outdated.
Guy Ritchie may not have matured that much yet, he just got slower. Which, in this particular case, is still something positive.