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The Gentlemen
Movie

The Gentlemen

2020 • Unknown

Woke Score
4
out of 10

Plot

American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.

Overall Series Review

The Gentlemen is a return to form for Guy Ritchie, delivering a complex, fast-paced crime caper in a distinctly British style. The plot follows American expat Mickey Pearson, a highly successful marijuana magnate, as he attempts to sell his massive, profitable operation in London, triggering a cascade of plots, schemes, and double-crosses from rivals and opportunists. The movie is a highly stylized, dialogue-heavy narrative told through the lens of a sleazy private investigator's proposed screenplay, which creates a meta-commentary on the film's own genre conventions. Characters are universally ruthless, defined by their cunning, competence, and criminal ambition rather than their background. The film's major themes revolve around power, class, loyalty, and the blurry lines between high society and the underworld. While the film is largely successful as a genre piece, it is heavily criticized for its frequent use of racial and sexual slurs and stereotypes, which are employed as 'equal-opportunity offenses' for darkly comic effect. The female characters, though few, are portrayed as formidable and capable equals to their male counterparts, albeit within a highly masculine and often objectifying world. Ultimately, the film avoids political messaging in favor of transgressive humor and the amoral code of the criminal underworld, placing it distinctly outside the 'woke' narrative framework.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics3/10

The narrative places criminals of various races and ethnicities (American, British, Chinese, Jewish) in conflict, where competence and ambition are the primary drivers of success and failure, not intersectional hierarchy. The film avoids lecturing on 'whiteness' or systemic oppression. However, it earns a low-to-moderate score due to the inclusion of 'casual racism' and ethnic slurs, which are used for 'equal-opportunity offenses' and politically incorrect humor, directly opposing the woke agenda of policing language.

Oikophobia4/10

The film focuses its critique on the hypocrisy and decay of the British aristocracy, showing how they are cash-strapped and reliant on the protagonist, an American 'interloper,' to fund the upkeep of their stately homes. This deconstructs the elite symbol of British heritage, but it frames the core institutions (family, loyalty) as vital within the criminal sphere and does not demonize the nation itself. The critique is focused on class and hypocrisy, not civilizational self-hatred.

Feminism3/10

The main female character, Rosalind, is a competent businesswoman and an equal, formidable partner to the protagonist. She is never depicted as incompetent and actively defends herself in a crucial scene. The film is male-centric with an overall lack of female characters, and it includes plot devices of threatened rape and 'female objectification' for shock value and criminal leverage. The central relationship celebrates the male-female couple and is not anti-natalist, but the use of women as objects in the criminal plot lowers the score toward the non-woke end of the spectrum.

LGBTQ+2/10

The movie completely rejects the 'Queer Theory Lens,' containing no political lecture on sexual ideology, transitioning, or deconstruction of the nuclear family. Instead, it features 'a constant barrage of sex jokes' and uses negative stereotypes, such as hinting that a character is a 'gay pervert' for comedic and transgressive effect, which positions it at the opposite extreme from a woke narrative. The normative male-female pairing is the emotional core of the film.

Anti-Theism9/10

The entire moral framework of the story operates entirely within a criminal code, where 'gentlemen's' rules, loyalty, and betrayal determine right and wrong. There is no acknowledgment of a higher moral law or objective truth; the world is driven purely by subjective 'power dynamics' and self-interest. The absence of any positive or critical religious discussion, particularly Christianity, results in the highest score, as the film's morality is functionally relativistic to the extreme.