The Gentlemen season 2 is cracking – but where have the jokes gone?

Have you heard The Gentlemen is back? The Netflix promotion has been impossible to avoid – both the intentional and the inadvertent, thanks to the maybe-casting of a certain Royal.

But Meghan Markle is a matter for the as-yet-unconfirmed season three. We still have season two to get through, all episodes of which land behind the Tudum logo today.

The Gentlemen has already far surpassed the 2019 film it was spun off from and a slick second season proves this Guy Ritchie thing will be able to run and run.

Albeit not during the first episode, which is the weakest of the eight-part batch, hamstrung by Maya Jama, who is impossible to forget is Maya Jama, and a lumbering Michele Morrone performance as a Mafia buffoon. Mercifully, he doesn’t stick around long.

But he does offer an entree to the Italian criminal underworld. Into it goes our hard-as-nails Duke Eddie Horniman, a swaggering return from Theo James. In another life it might have been his Bond audition.

At his side is cucumber-cool Susie Glass, played by Kaya Scodelario with a neutralising quality to all the testosterone. She remains delightful to watch and inscrutable to read, with far more autonomy this season.

The Duke and Susie’s will-they-won’t-they is heavily played in the first few episodes, but there’s that season three to think of, so you can imagine where it all goes. 

Since we last saw them, the Glass family have expanded their weed farms to the palazzos and villas of the cash-poor Italian nobility. This puts their operation on a collision course with big Mafia boss Marco Moretti (Conclave’s Sergio Castellitto – a baddie par excellence) and his charming Contessa contact (Benedetta Porcaroli), whose eyes wander over to Eddie.

That Britalian tussle is the core plot, but Ritchie went to the school of ‘more is more’. There are too many characters, criminal tangents, blatant Campari placements and cameos (Chris Eubank the most left-field of them) to mention.

Hugh Bonneville joins the cast as a toff trying to give Eddie a leg up into the House of Lords. There’s a bill to decriminalise marijuana. Also, a proposal, then a wedding. Plus, a tense nighttime manor invasion.

Ray Winstone and Giancarlo Esposito remain woefully underused. Winstone’s Bobby Glass is still banged up in the cushiest knick known to man, where he seems to live in the sauna, harping on about mystical beings.

There’s more misplaced mysticism with Stanley ‘with a T’ Johnston (Esposito). Ritchie and his writing crew clearly don’t have the foggiest what to do with him. So he’s forced to deliver monologues in which Eddie is compared to both the monarch and Jesus, complete with a montage of ecclesiastical imagery. I had to check out for those parts.

Gamekeeper Geoff (Vinnie Jones – another example of the show’s rare restraint) is trapped in The Gentlemen’s superficial attempt to ‘check its privilege’ and reckon with the class divide. All it accomplishes is a clunky reminder that I probably shouldn’t like any of these people, who the show has done a stellar job of winning me over to.

The older gents aren’t the only ones given short shrift. Season two’s use of Daniel Ings is baffling. It borders on the ‘Was there an almighty fallout?’ level of confounding.

Coke-fuelled, shambolic Freddie was the undoubted stand-out of season one. His surreal chicken humiliation ritual is still the most memorable of the lot. But I can count his season two scenes on my fingers and they’re going to come as a tonal right-turn for the Freddie-heads.

All season, he’s stuck in a rehab facility making doe-eyes at family members who can be bothered to visit him. It does nothing to help with the season’s biggest problem: a chronic case of sense of humour failure. 

Flecks of Ritchie’s signature bold, brash, British style are still there – but where are the gags? The hijinks? There’s nothing even close to those heady chicken heights. This new eight-parter has lost the Ritchie quintessence the first so impeccably captured.

All that being said, I had a cracking time watching the good and the bad of it all. At least with that ‘more is more’ approach, you’re seldom bored. 

The Gentlemen season 2 is available to stream on Netflix.