It took Guy Ritchie a little over a decade to make the transition from self-styled auteur to journeyman, and his output was hardly worse off for the change.
At the turn of the century, he announced himself as the swaggering enfant terrible of British genre cinema with the sharp Cockney crime pic “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” though the law of diminishing returns set in fast: 2008’s “RocknRolla” was a tired gangster retread that still marked a step up from the Madonna folly “Swept Away” and the incomprehensible, Kabbalah-inflected “Revolver.”A reset was called for; slick studio tentpole projects beckoned, ranging from a snazzy “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” revival to an impersonal but profitable turn in the Disney stable with “Aladdin.” It’s a second phase that has bought enough goodwill for Ritchie to don his tweed auteur flatcap once more.
Enter “The Gentlemen,” a knockabout
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