The Gentleman [2020]

Language - English
Director - Guy Ritchie
Run Time - 1 hour, 53 minutes
Genre - Action
Starring - Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Hugh Grant, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Colin Farrell and Henry Golding

Guy Ritchie has been one of my favourite directors with movies like Snatch, Lock Stock.., Rocknrolla and Sherlock Homes franchise. But in all honesty, this movie kind of disappointed me. Don't get me wrong, this is not a bad movie. It's just that my expectations from the director are quite tall. He has been on a downward spiral over the years and is shifting towards making more commercial films - Man from U.N.C.L.E., King Arthur and Aladdin were all sub-par movies which left the viewer wanting more.

With such an impressive ensemble cast, I expected him to return to his prime, but the plot was too simple for a Guy Ritchie movie, and again, the audience was left with a sense of unsatisfaction.

The first half the movie follows a narration between Fletcher (Grant), an investigative journalist and Ray (Hunnam) who is the right-hand man the suave drug lord Mickey Pearson (McConaughey). Mickey is tired of living this life and intends to get out by selling his business to American billionaire Mathew (Strong). In walks Dry Eye (Golding), an up and coming gangster who wants the business for himself and is not willing to play by the old rules. Therein starts the chaos which is always a feature of the director.

Like in most Guy Ritchie stories, we have a multitude of characters, major and minor - but one thing which I felt here was not enough time was given to the minor characters for them to have a significant presence. I have a sense that the filmmaker wanted to finish the movie in under two hours and thus, it seemed quite rushed to me.

Don't get me wrong, it was an entertaining film, and the starry cast lived up to expectations, but I would not see this movie multiple times as I have with other Guy Ritchie movies. For me, it was nothing extraordinary.

An average moviegoer might just like the movie, but I really was quite indifferent to it.

My Rating - 7/10

1917 [2019]

Language - English
Director - Sam Mendes
Run Time - 1 hour, 59 minutes
Genre - War/Drama
Starring - George Mackay, Dean Charles-Chapman, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott and Richard Madden

1917 is a cinematic masterpiece by the talented Sam Mendes - of not only American Beauty fame but also the director of the Kite Runner, Road to Perdition and Skyfall. One can observe certain similarities in movies like Kite Runner, Road to Perdition, Spectre and 1917 where we have a single character or a duo chasing towards a very specific goal in the movie.

Mendes had for collaboration one of the best cinematographers in film history - Roger Deakin (Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, A Beautiful Mind and Blade Runner 2049). I've seen too many war movies, but none come to close to showing the gritty realities of war as marvellously as this duo has managed to do. No wonder this movie has been nominated for 10 Oscars!

The plot of the movie is set in the year 1917, against the backdrop of World War 1. Our two protagonists are soldiers who get a near-impossible mission to crossover to enemy lines and deliver a message that would prevent an entire division from walking into an ambush.

Mendes and Deakin have put in tremendous work in making this movie. If you observe - the movie seems to be shot in one take - similar to what Alejandro González Iñárritu did with Birdman in 2014. The film does not have a single moment of inaction because of this, and we follow the soldiers through their journey as they walk, run, swim and get shot at.

Also, credit has to be given to relatively unknown - Dean-Charles Chapman (Tommen Baratheon from GoT) and George MacKay. They carried the film on their own, with the rest of the star-studded cast only getting 2-5 minutes each.

Amazing movie, I would put it right up top with my other favourite war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge and Dr Strangelove.

Rating - 8.8/10. Do not miss out on this cinematic beauty. But do be prepared if you can get easily disturbed by corpses and animals eating out of the corpses.