Vinnie Jones is back in the frame as The Gentlemen’s season two draws a review that lands hard on the show’s excess. The verdict calls Guy Ritchie’s series “irritating, beautifully shot, overlong, extravagantly stupid and fitfully funny,” which is a blunt note for a returning title trying to stay ahead of its own first season.
The Gentlemen and Eddie Horniman
The review centers Theo James’s Edward “Eddie” Horniman, the 13th Duke of Halstead, and Vinnie Jones’s Geoff, with Eddie telling Geoff, “Four hundred years ago, this estate spread out as far as the eye could see” before adding, “But it’s been diminished. Year after year. Generation after generation. First came the apologies, then came the shame, then came the contraction. I want it back, Geoff.” That gives the season a clear business problem: Eddie wants the estate back while the world around him keeps pulling it apart.
Before season two, Eddie had already joined forces with Susie Glass to help head the cannabis operation running from a bunker on the estate. The review says he now wants to shake off Susie Glass and Bobby, move into an Italian drug deal with Marco Moretti, and become a hereditary peer so he can determine the outcome of a bill to decriminalise marijuana. That is a much bigger ask than settling old debts, and it pushes the character from local survival into a political play with sharper stakes.
Daniel Ings and Freddy
Daniel Ings gets the cleanest praise in the piece, with Freddy called “the best thing in this bunkum by a country mile.” That matters because the review is not treating the season as a simple victory lap for the returning ensemble; it is separating the parts that still work from the material that drags.
The same review also points to a motorcycle chase, a coveted Botticelli, and Hugh Bonneville’s turn as Lord Hawthorne, who says, “I am being greased!” Bobby, meanwhile, keeps barking orders from between his sauna and hot tub. Those details keep the season in Guy Ritchie’s usual lane, where crime, status games, and absurdity are all trying to outrun each other.
Fitfully funny, overlong
The contradiction in the review is the point: season two is judged irritating and overlong, yet also beautifully shot and fitfully funny. That combination is harder to dismiss than a clean pan or a clean rave, because it says the series still has a visual grip and a comic pulse even when the machinery feels overextended.
For viewers, that means The Gentlemen remains the kind of returning title where the strongest draw is not plot novelty but the way the cast carries Ritchie’s broad crime-playbook through another round of vanity, violence, and negotiation. If season two works, it will be through the same mix that made the first season easy to recognize; if it drags, the review has already named the fault line.
