Weekend Watchlist - 7th June 2024

The Gentlemen and The Fall Guy

The expression, “made for modern audiences,” when said with a curling of the lip, always makes me chuckle.

“Modern - relating to the present or recent times.”

Every movie, whenever it’s released, is made for the audience of that time. Therefore modern audience.

Can you imagine the cinema going public from the 1940’s watching the greatest movie of all time, John Carpenter’s, The Thing?! They would run for the hills!

That aforementioned classic has also reminded me about the relationship between a movies greatness and it’s box office, which I’ll come back to later.

However, what I also wanted to discuss is the relatively recent desire to make entertainment resemble how it was twenty, thirty or forty years ago, or to revive long dormant genres or franchises. It seems to be an obsession with both audiences and studios to want to try and tap into rose tinted memories. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all like looking back to our younger years and reminiscing about the good old days, but this can be a double edged sword for many reasons. Sometimes the viewers will relate and sometimes, despite the best efforts of the creators, they won’t.

The TV show and movie that I wanted to look at this week, whilst both deliberately harking back to the past, each take different approaches to make us feel nostalgic or emotional about what has gone before. One does it successfully, and the other not so much.

First up is The Gentlemen by Guy Ritchie which is on Netflix.

I like Guy Ritchie’s movies. Actually, let me re-phrase that. I liked Guy Ritchie’s movies.

In 1998 he gave us Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels which introduced the world to Jason Statham, and also had the novelty casting of famed “hard man” footballer, Vinnie Jones. The film was a huge hit. A few years later it was followed by Snatch again starring Statham but now, due to the success of the previous film, with a much more starry cast including Brad Pitt and Benicio del Toro.

Both concerned the London gangster scene, and are stuffed with dodgy geezers, double crossing toe rags and punchy dialogue. Ritchie was hailed as the British Tarantino when such a thing still carried some clout.

Then in 2002, with his wife Madonna, he made the disaster that was Swept Away. The two of them had been hounded by the tabloid press, who never seem to learn their lessons, and the failure was pounced on with manic glee. Ritchie, smarting from his first commercial disappointment, pivoted back to what he knew best.

Unfortunately, the two films that followed, Revolver (2005) and RocknRolla (2008), were disappointments despite them being set once more in the shady world of the London crime scene that the director knew so well. It looked like Ritchie’s time may have passed.

But then, in 2009, he made a movie that caught everyone by surprise, and really cemented the return of Robert Downey Jnr, after Iron Man, to the role of leading actor once again.

Sherlock Holmes, and it’s sequel A Game of Shadows in 2011, were excellent adaptations of the famous detectives story with a modern twist which were raised to another level with the chemistry between Downey and Jude Law as Watson. Both films were huge hits, and are probably my two favourite Guy Ritchie movies. They’re just a lot of fun, but still treat the source material with respect.

Since then, he became a bit of a director for hire with The Man from UNCLE and then the remake of Aladdin. The former was good natured fun, the latter was a huge hit but contained none of the charm of the original.

Then in 2019, he made The Gentlemen starring Matthew McConaughey as an American graduate of Oxford who sets up a marijuana empire on the estates of the British gentry. I have to admit, for full disclosure, that I haven’t watched the movie. When I saw the trailer, I just groaned. The vibe he seemed to be going for was so twenty years ago, and I had no interest in that, and therefore gave it a miss.

And the same would have been said for the TV show of the same name that appeared on Netflix this year. The story is slightly different, in that the main character is now one of the British landowners, but, apart from that, the plot appears to be the same, give or take.

However, people began to comment on my Watchlists that I should give it a look as it was really good, and when I checked with my friends, a few of them also recommended it, so I figured it must have something. And here we are.

What I will say is, that by the end of the first episode, I thought everyone had taken leave of their senses, or I was watching the wrong show.

It was like a bad imitation of a Guy Ritchie movie from 25 years earlier. Shady geezers, dodgy gangsters, boxing matches, scenes in a gym, quick jump cuts, thinking that swear words are exclusively funny and, of course, Vinnie Jones. It’s all just so tired and dull. It was tired and dull twenty years ago. Why go back to that same well again? Also, just as side note, monologue spouting hard men are only found in TV or movies, and are also a huge cliche. I grew up around a lot of tough men, and they never wasted words when they knew one look would suffice. I very nearly didn’t make it to the end of the forty five minute run time or whatever it was. I’d had more than enough.

Then I realised that I could be making the same mistake as I had done with previous shows, and writing it off too early. Unlikely, but still possible. So I ploughed on.

Episode two was doing slightly better, then Giancarlo Esposito pops up playing basically the same character from Breaking Bad which is probably meant to be really meta, but is just irritating. However, not nearly as annoying as the writing that appears on screen to explain the plot to the audience as if it’s some labyrinthine mystery and not something that could have been written by a toddler on an etch a sketch. Ray Winstone then appears and shouts, “You caaaaantt!” at everyone, and I could literally feel my brains dribbling out my ears. But I kept watching.

Episode 3 has fast cars. Episode 4 has Nazi’s, and is really problematic. Episode 5 has travellers (what a surprise!) but it’s beginning to find it’s feet. By episode 6 it’s beginning to slip and slide again. And when the last two episodes roll around they had either run out of money, or patience, or both. But I had watched it all. Why?

I can say quite clearly that it’s not good. It just isn’t. It’s hackneyed, predictable and twenty five years out of date. The main character Eddie played by Theo James is a charisma vacuum, we really don’t care about upper class twits (I could have used another word there) or their problems, and Esposito and Winstone have clearly signed the “20 minute cameo contract” for all their appearances are worth over the entire series. All that being said, Kaya Scodelario playing Susie Glass is an absolute revelation. At the start you think she will just be a supporting actor but, by the end, she is the star of the show. At times terrifying, funny, tender and vulnerable this is a great performance by an actor I hadn’t been aware of until now. She is just about the only reason to keep watching this mess. Sort of recommended. If you like that sort of thing. I guess. Maybe.

Anyway, on to The Fall Guy.

As folks may have figured out by now, I’m a huge fan of the movies. I might even like them more than books!  Just kidding. Honest.

There are also a lot of movies about making movies, and most of them range from pretty good to fantastic. In no particular order there’s Get Shorty, The Player, Ed Wood, The Aviator and probably many more I can’t think of at the moment. I suppose there are some bad ones but the less times we mention Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or Quentin Tarantino in an article the better.

It is supposedly a remake/re-imagining of the TV show of the same name from back in the 80’s that starred Lee Majors as stuntman, Colt Seavers who also moonlighted as a bounty hunter. I remember quite enjoying it, but it wasn’t as relevant to me as say The A-Team, Knight Rider or Airwolf. However, it did have a brilliant theme song. I remember that much!

This movie is directed by David Leitch, who is a former stunt performer, and stars Ryan Gosling as the aforementioned Seavers who comes out of retirement when the star of the film, his ex-girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt) is directing, goes missing. Again, it’s a simple plot but what follows is a brilliantly funny romantic comedy that also manages to be a tribute to the movie industry and the wonderful stunt men and women who, for some reason, still don’t get recognised by the Academy for their commitment to the craft.

From the first chords of Thunderstruck in an opening scene, to quoting Rocky and Aliens, to showing behind the camera and how so many movies couldn’t be made without these dedicated people, it’s an absolute blast.

It’s also deeply weird in places which I loved. A fight in a nightclub is like a mix of anime and video game play and is brilliantly staged. There is a bit with a unicorn which takes a moment and then is perfectly understandable and yet totally original at the same time. The scene in the karaoke bar is genius. Aaron Taylor-Johnson turns up and purposefully chews the scenery for all he’s worth as superstar idiot Tom Ryder (a little on the nose but who cares) and the film barrels along with enough action and laughs to make up for any number of hours of drek I had to sit through with The Gentlemen. There’s also a hugely predictable but very welcome cameo right at the end.

The real magic of course comes from Gosling and Blunt. He’s all cheeky smiles and snappy one liners and she plays it perfectly straight with dry put downs to his supposedly charming ways. Their chemistry really does hark back to the golden age of Hollywood and is very apt in a movie about that beloved industry.

I thought it was really outstanding, and just like Dungeons and Dragons from last year might have seemed an unusual choice, this is easily my movie of the year so far. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Go and rent it or download it or whatever it’s called these days, so it might become a hit on streaming as we’re being constantly told it sure as hell wasn’t a hit in the cinema.

And this is the final point I want to talk about. It feels weird to still be saying this as it feels like I have been saying it for about forty years but folks still don’t get it.

The relationship between the box office for a movie and it’s quality is not linked. Somehow people still struggle with this but it’s just not. To put it in plain terms, the absolutely awful Transformer movies that Michael Bay made, raked in billions, and then you have three of the best movies of the 80’s in The Thing, Blade Runner and Highlander, which are classics, and yet were huge box office flops, only to be found again on video.

I could list so many movies that are now in most people’s top 10 or 20 favourite films of all time that sunk without a trace in the cinema.

Hopefully, all reasonably minded people can understand this. So, why do so many critics, and many of them can be found on this platform, crow more when a film underperforms at the box office, rather than when it’s a success. It seems they want their doom laden predictions about cinema to come true. And it absolutely drives me up the wall.

The Fall Guy is fantastic. It made $150M at the world wide box office. A not insignificant sum, but it’s deemed a “failure” and we get miles of column inches on why it happened. It has happened for decades and will continue to keep happening. It’s not something new. You’re not being edgy or different by blaming modern audiences for this, that, and the other. That’s what critics did in the 70’s and the 80’s and the 90’s when movies didn’t find their audience so, for the love of everything you find holy, please give it a rest.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. Martin Scorsese, Edgar Wright and Christopher Nolan have all bemoaned this obsession with numbers with the latter saying : -

“I know for myself the life of the movie is a much longer proposition in that, you look at other peoples films and indeed your own films in decades not in weekends.”

Also, here’s

JB Minton 📺

who knows a heck of a lot more about movies than I do, agreeing with me about how great it really is : -

On The Fall Guy (2024)

Anyway, The Fall Guy - very good. Financially obsessed critics - not so good.

Next week I’ll be looking at Eric with Benedict Cumberbatch on Netflix and I’ll finally catch up with Godzilla Minus One which has just appeared on the same channel so that should be good fun.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.