The Gentlemen Review: Guy Ritchie’s Netflix Crime Comedy Is a Romp

Netflix’s The Gentlemen reimagines Guy Ritchie’s 2019 film as an eight-episode series with an entirely new cast and story. Theo James stars as Eddie Halstead, an army captain who inherits his family’s sprawling English country estate and discovers that the previous duke had been running an enormous marijuana operation out of the property’s vast underground facilities. Eddie’s attempts to extricate himself from the criminal underworld — while navigating aristocratic snobbery, family dysfunction, and his own surprising aptitude for criminal logistics — make for a breezy, stylish, and thoroughly entertaining season of television.

How We Reviewed: Our analysis rests on rewatching key episodes to confirm initial impressions and viewing all available episodes before publishing. Ratings reflect full-season viewing, critical analysis, and production quality assessment. These recommendations reflect our independent assessment, not paid partnerships.

The Reluctant Criminal

Theo James is surprisingly good as Eddie, playing against his brooding image with comic timing and a physical looseness that serves the material well. Eddie is a man of principle who discovers that principles are expensive, and James makes his gradual seduction by the criminal lifestyle both funny and believable. The moment when Eddie first uses his military training to solve a criminal problem — the instant recognition that his skills in tactical planning and personnel management transfer perfectly to organized crime — is played with a delightful mix of alarm and satisfaction that defines the show’s tone.

Kaya Scodelario is a scene-stealer as Eddie’s mischievous sister Susie, who adapts to criminal life with alarming enthusiasm and competence. Scodelario brings a sharpness to Susie that makes her the show’s most entertaining character, and her scenes with James have a sibling chemistry that feels genuine — the bickering, the reluctant admiration, the unspoken understanding that they are both having more fun than they should be.

Daniel Ings provides comic relief as Eddie’s feckless brother Freddy, whose bumbling creates escalating problems that Eddie must solve with increasing exasperation. Giancarlo Esposito brings quiet menace as a drug lord whose patience with Eddie’s learning curve has clear and dangerous limits. Ray Winstone is reliably entertaining as a veteran gangster whose advice to Eddie is simultaneously helpful and self-serving.

The Ritchie Formula

The show captures Ritchie’s signature style — quick cuts, narrated double-crosses, the collision of high and low culture — without feeling like a retread of his earlier work. The English countryside setting provides gorgeous backdrops for increasingly absurd criminal schemes, and the contrast between stately homes and drug operations generates consistent comedy. A sequence involving a cannabis harvest that must be completed before a garden party is pure Ritchie — absurd logistics played with complete seriousness by everyone involved.

The plotting is intricate without being confusing, with each episode introducing new complications that Eddie must navigate through a combination of military strategy, aristocratic charm, and improvised violence. The show is pure entertainment — witty, well-paced, and populated by charismatic actors having a wonderful time. The dialogue is sharp enough that individual lines lodge in your memory, and the recurring motif of aristocratic language applied to criminal activity never gets old.

Limitations

The Gentlemen is not deep television, and it does not pretend to be. The characters are types rather than fully developed people, the plots resolve too neatly, and the stakes never feel genuinely dangerous. The show lives in a consequence-free universe where crime is fun and the worst outcome is mild embarrassment or a ruined dinner jacket. This works as entertainment but limits the show’s ability to achieve anything lasting or to generate the kind of genuine tension that the best crime dramas deliver.

The show knows what it is and does not pretend otherwise, which is both its greatest strength and its ceiling. It never reaches for profundity, but it also never insults your intelligence.

Verdict

As pure fun — witty, handsome, and effortlessly rewatchable — The Gentlemen is one of Netflix’s most enjoyable recent shows. Theo James and Kaya Scodelario make the Halstead siblings irresistible, the English countryside has never looked better, and Guy Ritchie’s formula translates to the longer format with ease. Do not expect profundity and you will have a great time.

Rating: 7.5/10

For more Netflix entertainment, see the Netflix Best Original Shows in 2025 and the Best Crime Shows Streaming in 2025.