ARTICLE AD BOX
Guy Ritchie has put the geezer in the freezer. The once and future king of bantering bad boys is branching out this month with a foray into rollicking pulp adventure. He’s going from Vinnie Jones to Indiana Jones with new film Fountain of Youth – a cheery riff on Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure and the Uncharted video games, starring Natalie Portman and John Krasinski as sibling explorers on the globe-hopping trail of the secret to eternal life.
“I found myself feeling like if I wasn’t too careful, I was ending up in a comedy-action-gangster genre, of which, of course, I’m comfortable and enjoy,” Ritchie told Entertainment Weekly. “But at some point, I thought, you have to spread your wings as a writer-director.”
The British filmmaker has veered into unexplored territory several times across his nearly 30-year career – only to always return to what he knows best. Fair enough, his first attempt at trying something different was the disastrous 2002 desert island romcom Swept Away, starring then-wife Madonna. (“Everyone in England has slagged it off without having seen it,” protested Madge, as the project died an instant death). Yet, with the exception of that misfire – sunk more by Madonna’s terrible acting than Ritchie’s directing – his less geezer-iffic movies have been fresh and delightful and much more interesting than the gurning gangster stuff.
As Ritchie is no doubt aware, spreading your wings as a director can end with a spectacular crash to earth. When Martin Scorsese swapped the neon squalor of 1970s Times Square for Broadway show tunes with 1977 musical New York, New York, he barely recovered. One reason Quentin Tarantino never followed through on his pledge to make a sweary Star Trek film was surely that he sensed the potential for Vulcan egg on his face. (Golden age science fiction and the man who wrote Samuel L Jackson’s Ezekiel 25:17 monologue in Pulp Fiction were never going to mix – Tarantino was savvy enough to know it.)
Then there is Steven Spielberg, who tried screwball comedy once with the wildly unfunny John Belushi WW2 caper 1941 and never went back. (Of course, others have changed course successfully – see David Lynch going brilliantly sentimental with The Straight Story or sci-fi maestro Ridley Scott sticking it to the patriarchy with Thelma & Louise.)
In the case of Ritchie, though, there is the case that his obsession with Cockney bad boys has been more a curse than a blessing. Ever since breaking through with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (in which Jones excelled as a droll hardman), he’s never fully moved on from lairy anti-heroes – arguably with ever-diminishing results.
In the late 1990s, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was a breath of cinematic fresh air that posed the novel question: What would an episode of Minder look like if directed by Sam Peckinpah? Its riotous juxtaposition of black humour and stylised violence put Ritchie on the map. “Up until then, the most amount of money I had ever earned was about $250 a week,” he told American radio in 2017. “I made millions of dollars over a weekend.”
But perhaps he was too fixated on the bottom line because, ever since, he’s been churning out variations on the formula. His 2000 hit Snatch was essentially Lock, Stock and One Smoking Brad Pitt (who commanded the screen with a semi-convincing Irish Traveller accent). That was followed by 2008’s RocknRolla (Lock, Stock and a Hollywood Budget) and his 2015 remake of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which blended period espionage with his trademark trigger-happy action. More recently, there was the romping The Gentlemen – a sort of Guy Ritchie’s Greatest Hits rustled up for Netflix – and brooding Paramount + series MobLand, aka Lock, Stock and One Grumpy Tom Hardy.
The Ritchie gangster flick is a widely beloved subgenre, and needless to say, nobody does it better – with the possible exception of Jonathan Glazer, who added a jot of Lynchian weirdness with the 2001 Ray Winston vehicle Sexy Beast. However, Ritchie can do a lot more than direct Jones walking into an East End boozer. There is an argument that he’s at his best as a filmmaker when he takes the path less travelled.
Exhibit A is his 2009 Sherlock Holmes – which reconnected with the rough and ready spirit of the Arthur Conan Doyle novels (on the page, Sherlock was a bruiser as well as a sleuth). Not only did it feature what might be the last truly essential Robert Downey Jr performance before he went into a decade of Iron Man auto-pilot – it demonstrated Ritchie could combine pacy set-pieces and humour without relying on gangster banter or Jones cameos.
I like street life, but I like grand things, too. Being able to move within those two worlds appealed to me
Guy Ritchie
More than 15 years on, his Sherlock Holmes (who returned for an underrated 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) has aged much better than the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman series, with its ludicrous plot holes and non-existent Holmes-Watson chemistry.
Ritchie, it is true, brought some somewhat kooky notions to the Holmesian universe. Such as the idea that Sherlock was a sort of Victorian Bruce Lee. “Holmes was a gentleman but was also a street guy who could scruff it up a bit. I thought the story had lost that part of its essence,” the director commented at the time. “I like street life, but I like grand things, too. Being able to move within those two worlds appealed to me. Besides, he was the West’s first martial artist.”
His other big swing was 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Planned as the opening salvo in a Marvel-type Arthurian universe, the film is Ritchie’s love letter to John Boorman’s Excalibur, and Game of Thrones, of which he was a fan (he enjoyed the swearing).
It’s silly as anything but with a perfectly judged level of po-facedness. You can only pull fantasy off if you take it seriously – as Ritchie does even when presiding over a ridiculous opening scene in which elephants the size of mountains attack Camelot, only to be seen off by Eric Bana’s Uther Pendragon. Later, Charlie Hunnam’s Arthur is introduced as a street scamp gainfully employed in a brothel, while Jude Law’s villainous usurper Vortigern is a dashing blend of Darth Vader and Thrones’ Prince Joffrey – a pantomime villain that Ritchie and Law bring gleefully to life.
Tellingly, Ritchie approached Arthur as an opportunity to go and try something outside the box. “It’s easy for a filmmaker to stay within the genre he’s familiar with. It’s more challenging when you get outside of that,” he revealed to Entertainment Weekly.
He explained in the same interview that Sherlock Holmes had been a milestone in his career. “Sherlock Holmes. That was a genre I hadn’t tackled before, so you have to find a voice within that,” he said. “So it’s challenging, and you doubt yourself. Then you’re confident, and you doubt yourself, and you’re confident again.”
Sadly, the world was not ready for a medieval MCU. Impaled upon a dire box office performance, King Arthur ended up an estimated $150m in the red. Undeterred, Ritchie was lured away from the gangster genre again when directing Will Smith in 2019’s Aladdin – an undertaking he signed up for because his kids were fans of the 1992 Disney animation.
Disney’s live-action remakes have been hit and miss – and lately, the misses have outnumbered the hits (see Snow White and its nightmare-fuel CGI dwarves). Aladdin, by contrast, was Ritchie firing on all pistons. It showcased his lightness of touch – nobody can make the camera swoop and soar as effortlessly – and his ability to connect with actors. Inheriting Robin Williams’s part of The Genie, Smith radiates levels of movie star charm not seen since his 1990s heyday. Ritchie made him fall in love with being a charismatic A-lister again. (Obviously this proved short-lived, though the 2022 Oscar “slap” that put Smith’s career into freefall was a ludicrous twist worthy of a Guy Ritchie script.)
Those projects could have been springboards to something even more interesting. But again and again, Ritchie has returned to the safety of the gangster flick – a retreat to his comfort zone that reached creative bankruptcy with MobLand, which grimly runs the A-Z of Brit gangland cliches (Ritchie is executive producer and directed the pilot: it is a show forged in his image).
MobLand was gangster guff on auto-pilot – and there were reasons for worrying that, at age 56, Ritchie was finally phoning it in. However, with Fountain of Youth, he’s making another dash for creative freedom. Advance buzz on the movie is positive ahead of its 23 May release. If it does finally wean Ritchie off “wonky donkey Cockney capers” – his words – well, that would be a cinematic treasure beyond all imagining.
‘Fountain of Youth’ is released on Apple TV+ on 23 May
English (US) ·