Guy Ritchie is worth watching when his criminals and misfits get to talk. We are less persuaded when the violence takes over: the action can be cleanly staged and still give us little reason to care.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to the talk in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): Ritchie makes us lean in for the next line. The quick cuts and tangled criminal stories are familiar, but the dialogue is the reason to stay. That debut, followed by Snatch (2000), established a set of habits he has kept returning to. The early promise did not mean a steady run of successes: Swept Away (2002) and Revolver (2005) brought mixed results. We rate him most when he gives the characters time to talk, rather than assuming another burst of violence will keep us interested.
Sherlock Holmes (2009) took him into larger Hollywood productions, a stretch that also included Aladdin (2019). He returned to his crime-comedy territory with The Gentlemen (2020), but we would not make gangsters a requirement. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), with Henry Cavill, is a useful reminder of what else he can do. It is a spy caper that understands how much fun flirting can be. Ritchie can take his taste for misbehaving company into another genre without making every encounter a fight.
Cavill returns in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024), where Ritchie sends a gang of well-spoken wartime misfits on a secret mission. The action is cleanly staged and the company agreeable, but the film gives them too little chance of failure. We stopped being amused because the killings kept arriving at the same speed, with nobody on either side reacting. Ritchie is credited on the screenplay alongside three other writers, yet much of the dialogue amounts to instructions about the job. At 120 minutes, it wears out a joke that the actors cannot replenish.
MobLand (2025) has a related problem: Tom Hardy's entertaining fixer has to compensate for familiar gangster plotting and a slow start. Ritchie is one of its directors, alongside Anthony Byrne, Daniel Syrkin and Lawrence Gough, so its weaknesses cannot all be laid at his door. The sharp suits and black humour suit his established interests, but the thinner supporting characters leave too much resting on the stars whenever the pace drops. Regular viewers of crime television may find that decent company; we would want more particular reasons to care about the people. For Ritchie with better conversation, start with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or The Man from U.N.C.L.E..
Biography
Guy Ritchie is an English film director, producer and screenwriter. He was born on 10 September 1968 in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.
Ritchie left school at 15 and worked in entry-level jobs before directing television commercials and music videos. He directed the short film The Hard Case (1995) and made his feature debut with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). He followed this with Snatch (2000) and later directed Sherlock Holmes (2009) and its sequel (2011), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017), Aladdin (2019) and The Gentlemen (2020).
In 2024 he directed, co-wrote and produced The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. He also directed episodes of the series MobLand (2025).
