Guy Ritchie, the British film director, made his name with blackly funny movies, like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, about the grimy criminal underworld. But, given he was raised among the aristocracy (both of his parents remarried peers of the realm), it was perhaps only a matter of time before he combined his fantasy with his personal history. That vision is The Gentlemen: a show that invites us to believe that a hereditary peer is actually hard as nails. Somehow, that rarefied premise has resonated with viewers, and the show returns this week for a second season on Netflix.The Duke of Halstead aka Eddie (Theo James) and Susie (Kaya Scodelario) are now running the empire of her incarcerated father, Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone). But is it enough for a member of the British aristocracy to be a mere lieutenant? “It’s been diminished, year after year, generation after generation,” Eddie laments of his own privilege. “I want it back.” His big scheme involves an Italian crime lord and his own elevation to the House of Lords. For the former, he needs mafia boss Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto) and, for the latter, he requires the support of Dickie (Hugh Bonneville). But most of all, he needs his partnership with Susie to endure, even as he starts to expand his horizons beyond the Glass family.Adapted from Ritchie’s own 2019 film, The Gentlemen has been a slow-burn hit for Netflix. It took five months after the show premiered in 2024 for a second series to be commissioned; now a third has been ordered before the second has even aired. The word-of-mouth success could be attributed to the show’s playful subversion of genre conventions, which might have made it hard for viewers to know what to expect but provided several standout shock moments. In its second series, the sensibility is clearer: a gangster romp, so ludicrous that it ascends into the realm of comedy. Eddie and Susie tussle with Peruvian cartels, corrupt Emirati royals, and industrial action amongst their cannabis growers. It is a world away from The Wire or even The Sopranos. This is Goodfellas for a generation raised on comic book movies.In that sense, the show is perfectly enjoyable. Sugary and disposable, viewers will demolish this eight-episode second series in record time. But the craftsmanship feels increasingly shonky. The show has recently been linked with Meghan Markle’s return to acting (a casting that has subsequently been denied) and Ritchie is no stranger to stunt casting. If former footballer Vinnie Jones seemed an unlikely collaborator when he appeared in Lock, Stock, he is altogether more convincing than Love Island host Maya Jama, who debuts here as a fixer, Aisha. “You never said about your Duke looking like a movie star,” she purrs, with all the natural ease of a pine floorboard. Hers is not the only wooden performance. While Bonneville has great fun as a greasy Lord, the show sorely misses Daniel Ings’s Freddy, who is relegated to the periphery of most of the action. James – surely an outside bet for the next James Bond – is all one-note brooding menace, while Scodelario struggles with some of the show’s clumsiest dialogue. She tries, and fails, to wrap her mouth around lines like “he’s like a dog with six dicks, but they all point in the direction of a vajayjay” and “so the Bish ish has turned into a mish”. Kaya Scodelario and Theo James in ‘The Gentlemen’ (Netflix)That’s why, even if the show is good fun, it also cannot be condoned. The writing – both dialogue and plotting – is frankly atrocious. The simplicity of the original narrative thread – a clean-cut, upper-crust man descends into violent crime – is obscured, now, by the machinations of various criminal enterprises, not to mention MacGuffins like a saker racing falcon and a Botticelli painting. The verbose scripts feel like first drafts that needed revision. “You’ve been able to pull silver linings out of murky waters,” Susie notes, mixing metaphors with reckless abandon. “I don’t ever want to see your grubby little face ever again,” Dickie says, and even with Bonneville’s deft delivery, the line feels obviously wrong to the human ear. It makes the show, which is frenetic already, feel rushed.Of course, none of that will matter to those who view The Gentlemen merely as a blood-spattered romp through English country houses. It is a macho fantasy, albeit an oddly sexless one. But just like the countless Marvel movies that have dominated the cinema box office, The Gentlemen prioritises the easy gratification of vaguely witty dialogue over actual jokes, big twists over character development, and cheap thrills over earned tension. The result is a brash show that, not unlike the English aristocracy, isn’t working nearly hard enough.