Guy Ritchie

Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not as in gritty northern blokes smoking Woodbines and moaning a lot; rather, as in the writers throwing in everything but. A fortnight ago, I reviewed Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: a Netflix show that doesn’t so much combine slapstick, violence, cheery banter, mean banter, mystery, media satire and dark broodings on life, as simply shuttle between them. Now comes Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie, where again anybody searching for dramatic unity will search in vain.

Last year, I wrote a feature for this magazine in which, disturbed by the apparent revival in the British gangster genre, I counseled a degree of caution as to its practitioners’ apparent lack of discernment in their approach to the tropes and clichés of the tradition. “We will be left," I concluded, "with the cinematic equivalent of bald men fighting over a comb: a boot, stamping on a human face for all eternity, while someone calls someone else ‘a slag.’ It is not, perhaps, the most enticing of prospects.” If the Guy Ritchie-Tom Hardy collaboration MobLand is not as hideous a creation as this suggests, it is also something of a disappointment given the cast and creative talent involved.

Guy Ritchie only does one thing but he does it very well: slick, violent, sweary, black comedy capers about the unlikely intersection between toffs and the criminal underworld, invariably starring ex-footballer Vinnie Jones as a loveable tweed-wearing thug. If you were hoping for something different from The Gentlemen, prepare to be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you can never quite get enough of shotguns, stately homes, frantically crowbarred-in but still-quite-amusing one liners, rival gangsters, vast quantities of claret (in both vinous and sanguinary forms), torture, dolly birds, travellers, slightly annoying solecisms, fights, gambling and fat lines of cocaine, then this will be your cup of tea, guvnor, and no mistake, innit, what ho, old chap.

Have you been watching Sexy Beast on the Paramount+ streaming service? No? Well, it’s hard to say whether you’ve missed out on much. Amid the current vogue for reviving decades-old films and turning them into television series, musicals or what-have-you, revisiting Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 debut, a blackly comic crime caper that owes equal debts to Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Stephen Frears’s The Hit and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, was probably not on anyone’s bingo card for 2024.