10 min readFANCY ENTERING A world of smarmy mercenaries, expert street fighters, and both-sides-playing gangsters? It's impressive how much director Guy Ritchie insists on filling his work with his favorite tropes and stylistic flourishes from the action and crime worlds. Ever since his debut with the savvy 1998 gangster flick Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels—the influence of which can still be felt on British crime media today—Ritchie has been telling stories that are as aggressive as they are playful.
Ritchie started the acting career of Jason Statham, he's dabbled in micro budgets and blockbuster resources, and every time he's gotten into a creative slump, he's hit the reset button by making a new version of his Lock, Stock formula. He frequently rips up a linear story with sleight-of-hand structural tricks, like a con artist who got his hands on a normal narrative and wants to hoodwink us as much as he can get away with. Sometimes, he sits back and lets all the appealing elements of a story play out—it doesn't always make for great cinema, but when his films are good, they're smart, robust thrill rides, drawing on well-worn genre expectations with a bit of geezer oomph for good measure. This marks a good sign for his latest, In the Grey, a mercenary rescue film starring three returning Ritchie stars, Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eiza Gonzalez. We'll ignore the fact that the release has been delayed by over a year—the guy’s been busy making seven films and three TV shows this decade alone!
Watching every Guy Ritchie movie tunes you in to how often he's doing his own version of other celebrated action and thriller films. Wrath of Man is Ritchie doing Heat; The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Ritchie doing Bond; The Gentlemen is Ritchie doing… Well, Ritchie. Even Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels owes much of its DNA to Reservoir Dogs. To celebrate the release of Ritchie’s 17th film, here's a ranking of the geezer guru’s filmography thus far.
17. Swept Away (2002)
Where else to begin than with the most baffling misfire of Guy Ritchie’s career? After two films of wham, bam, thank you ma’am gangster fun, Ritchie cast his then-wife Madonna in a clumsy and cringy remake of an acerbic Italian anti-romcom from the 1970s, where a haughty rich wife is shipwrecked with the deckhand she’s been bullying all week. Madonna is not the reason this movie stinks, as Ritchie is completely out of his depth: the comedy is simple and weak, and any sultry mood is killed by the repeated romantic montages filling the film’s second half. Props to Ritchie for trying something different, but with only two films under his belt, there’s no way to read Swept Away as anything other than a calamitous unforced error.
16. Aladdin (2019)
It’s easy to see the Disney boardroom logic that got Ritchie the gig directing the live-action adaptation of Aladdin—our hero is a scrappy, wise-cracking street thief who uses his cheeky wit to get out of trouble. But once the opening number “One Step Ahead” is over and we leave the roofs and alleys of Agrabah for sultan chambers and genie caves, Ritchie delivers another safe, stilted product for Disney’s most eye-rolling branding exercise, including lackluster musical numbers and ugly CG visuals. At least Ritchie gave a starring role to future Smile 2 star Naomi Scott, and Will Smith’s Genie has some corny charm.
15. Fountain of Youth (2025)
It's hard to distinguish whether this globe-trotting, treasure-hunting adventure film is better than Aladdin, as they share many of the same problems: plain and heavily CG-tweaked visuals, a pale retread of beloved classic films, and a fatal lack of charisma. It doesn’t help that this swashbuckler, starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as the children of a famous treasure-hunter on the trail of the legendary fountain of youth, is way more Dan Brown than it is Indiana Jones. Truth be told, anyone could have directed this, and Ritchie's willingness to deliver an anonymous and limp streaming “blockbuster” is depressing, particularly coming a few years after Aladdin forced him to rethink his legacy.
14. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023)
The prospect of Ritchie making a new action movie every year was tantalizing five years ago, but after this awkward and lethargic spy romp starring Jason Statham as secret agent extraordinaire Orson Fortune, we wondered if the director ought to scale back. There's so much going for Operation Fortune: a game comic cast of Aubrey Plaza, Josh Hartnett, and Hugh Grant sending up the sexy and brutal tonal clashes of James Bond, but the spy adventure is Peak Autopilot Cinema—never as funny, slick, or exciting as the film tells you it is. There’s a long cinematic history of ripping off 007 with a wink, and Operation Fortune’s lack of coolness indicates that Ritchie benefitted from the structured studio oversight he got during The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
13. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
Ritchie followed up Operation Fortune with a film that honored 007’s origins in Britain's SAS—so much so that Bond author Ian Fleming makes a cameo (played by Freddie Fox). The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is, thankfully, a step up from Operation Fortune—the cast feels more in sync, the action is tastier, and the Dirty Dozen-esque premise (renegade soldiers leading a clandestine sabotage mission against the Nazis’ U-boat suppliers) excites Ritchie more than the secret agent shtick of Ruse de Guerre. Still, this is no Inglourious Basterds, and watching Ritchie pilfer from modern and classic war exploitation films for two hours gets tiresome. Props to Henry Cavill, who taps into his roguish leader energy with great results.
12. The Gentlemen (2019)
The first half of The Gentlemen—a feisty, foul-mouthed multi-strand gangster story with an absurd number of exaggerated criminal personalities—is pretty convincing as a back-to-basics career reboot. Matthew McConaughey is an England-based marijuana baron whose weed empire is threatened by conspiring rivals; when the story is first being flamboyantly reported to Charlie Hunnam's gangster protagonist by Hugh Grant’s limey private eye, The Gentlemen pulls you in. Sadly, the puerile humor, busy plotting, and over-egged machismo hits critical mass—Ritchie’s return to his roots is better suited as a less try-hard TV series.
11. RocknRolla (2008)
Ritchie’s first attempt to evoke the street crime chaos of his first two films came after his first two flops. RocknRolla reflects a modern London, still foul-mouthed and ugly, but now cashing in on the grittier tone of crime cinema in 2008. Gerard Butler is “One-Two,” a gangster on the up who wants to get a slice of a dodgy real estate deal going down in London. Like Lock, Stock and Snatch before it, RocknRolla has a dozen weird and wild characters, each embedded in their own money-making subplots and played by exciting talent (Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, and… Ludacris?!) but Ritchie’s update to his signature style of gangster movie doesn’t sing like it did the first time. Still, it's better than when he went back to the well with The Gentlemen.
10. In the Grey (2026)
Ritchie's latest (and very delayed) film fits snugly into the globe-trotting mercenary thriller mold established by Operation Fortune and Ungentlemanly Warfare. Thankfully, this modest thriller about smarmy corporate saboteurs forcing a wealthy villain to pay a client $1 billion is light on irritating genre pastiche, and much heavier on mercs-in-motion. Eiza González is Rachel, a powerful lawyer who tries to recover Rosamund Pike's massive debt with her mercenary team led by Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal (both in their element). It's not hard to see why In the Grey flopped in theaters—though full of firefights and cons, it can be weirdly frictionless and under-directed. Still, 90 minutes of chases and two beefcake leading men calling their boss "mom" makes this B-tier Ritchie film hard to dismiss outright.
9. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Easily Guy Ritchie’s most Zack Snyder-like film—we bet you didn’t know such a crossover was possible. King Arthur sank at the box office like a magic sword to the bottom of a lake, which is a shame because the blend of video-gamey fantasy with medieval crime gang subplots is strange enough to work. This film’s terrific first act—featuring demonic battles, dramatic treachery, and a hyperactive montage of Arthur growing up on Londinium’s streets before he dramatically pulls Excalibur from the stone—is followed by a disappointing hour of Arthur discovering his destiny, but Ritchie’s Arthurian romp sticks the landing with a souped-up and heavy metal final boss battle. You won’t find any of this in The Sword in the Stone.
8. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
This sequel to Ritchie’s surprise hit—a Sherlock action movie starring Robert Downey Jr.?!—introduces Holmes to two new rivals: Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) and Mary (Yellowstone star Kelly Reilly), aka the wife of Dr. Watson (Jude Law). In case this wasn't enough trouble, a conspiracy to kickstart European war is afoot, with Holmes’s smarts going up against industrial warfare. The unlikely magic of the first film is mostly still present, but A Game of Shadows does veer close to the upper limit of how many explosions a Sherlock Holmes story can take. Harris’s Moriarty is a highlight, especially when the film adapts the climax of The Final Problem by having the two nemeses algorithmically predict each other’s fight moves.
7. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (2023)
“We don’t need a translator for this,” says Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) before ambushing a Taliban stronghold and executing multiple targets. Despite those unpleasant militaristic vibes, The Covenant is in fact an Afghanistan war movie with a conscience, and it's rock solid work. The story is refreshingly simple—after a deadly skirmish with the Taliban, a U.S. sergeant is saved singlehandedly by the unit's Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim), and when Kinley returns home and realizes his friend is still in Afghanistan fending for his life, he goes on a dangerous rescue mission. The simplicity works—Gyllenhaal and Salim are convincing on-screen and there's basically no fat in the story, taking us nimbly from one action scene to another. The Covenant avoids all opportunities to interrogate the Afghanistan invasion, instead opting to revisit the military tenet of brotherly loyalty—but Ritchie’s work remains compelling and arresting.
6. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Now, this is how you do a B-tier throwback spy movie. This was Henry Cavill’s first lead role post-Man of Steel, playing debonair CIA agent Napoleon Solo, an inspired spot of casting that plays to Cavill's smug and suave strengths. The nuances of Cold War espionage are flattened into a fire-and-ice buddy dynamic, with Solo forced to pair up with Soviet agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) and a German bomb-maker’s daughter (Alicia Vikander) against covert Nazi forces. It's a smarmy caper that frequently puts a smile on your face, sending up the hokey sex comedy of old school Bond flicks. Along with X-Men: First Class (directed by Ritchie's former producer Matthew Vaughn), this film proves Gen X British guys love making tongue-in-cheek Cold War kitsch.
5. Revolver (2005)
Ritchie hasn't always played it safe—this pulpy, philosophy-spouting noir co-written by Luc Besson is still too reviled to develop a cult reputation. But there's so much to like—sporting a handlebar mustache, Jason Statham plays a revenge-seeking con man who gives all his fortune to a loan shark duo to protect him from a paranoid crime boss (Ray Liotta), and all the cryptic philosophizing dialogue and aggressive, neon-soaked visuals make Revolver feel like an opaque Nicolas Winding Refn film long before the Danish weirdo made Only God Forgives. It doesn't all work, but Ritchie dulls his usual gangster humor for something more weird, and builds a disorientating, deadening mood that makes Revolver’s exploration of ego an expected, beguiling success.
4. Sherlock Holmes (2009)
It’s worth remembering that when Sherlock Holmes was released on Christmas Day 2009, Guy Ritchie was not a blockbuster director, Robert Downey Jr. had only recently become an A-lister, and BBC’s Sherlock, which made Benedict Cumberbatch a household name, had not yet premiered. Sherlock Holmes was a real threshold-crossing moment—a maximalist caper about Victorian occultism with sublime married couple bickering courtesy of Holmes and his long-suffering Watson. This is the start, and arguably the peak, of Ritchie's blockbuster IP era—the fact that he made such a silly action movie out of such smart material is part of the appeal. You'll never hear the word “discombobulate” the same way again.
3. Wrath of Man (2021)
This excellent LA cash truck heist film snuck up on everyone, but we shouldn't have been surprised that Ritchie and Statham’s first film together in 15 years is a banger. Statham is H, the new driver at a security firm who's uncharacteristically motivated to fight back against the robbers hitting up trucks—but he's hiding a vengeful backstory. All of Ritchie's usual cheekiness is suppressed into an ominous, trigger-happy intensity, and Ritchie’s action chops have rarely been better—he's perfectly in sync with a late-era, near wordless Statham (not to mention a great ensemble: Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett, and Scott Eastwood) in a film that rivals Den of Thieves in its meathead Michael Mann sensibilities.
2. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Ritchie’s debut clearly owes a debt to the clever, convoluted crime romps of Quentin Tarantino and Shane Black, but the low-budget London gangster flick marks its own territory with a low-life London authenticity and the most geezer-tastic cast of Ritchie’s career; Whoever pulled together the largely unknown Jason Statham, Nick Moran, Jason Flemyng, and Dexter Fletcher deserves an Order of the British Empire. Thanks to its modest resources, Lock, Stock has an economy and pulse to its storytelling that isn't present in every Ritchie caper—we’d also welcome Sting or former footballer Vinnie Jones back in any future Ritchie film. It’s a funny, propulsive, and hugely influential flick. When we think of a Guy Ritchie film, this is the template we return to.
1. Snatch (2000)
This is it: The best version of Guy Ritchie’s geezer machismo, “tuff” guy violence, and street crime stupidity. Ritchie takes advantage of a bigger budget afforded by the success of Lock, Stock and basically perfects the formula—tons of interconnected crooks and chancers (including a few Hollywood faces, as Jason Statham and baby Stephen Graham are joined by Benicio Del Toro and Brad Pitt as an Irish traveler boxer) screaming expletives at each other and getting into hot water over stolen diamonds and fixed fights. Ritchie’s aggressive camera tricks and hyperactive editing feel more suited for scuzzy 2000-era London than it does later in his career, resulting in a funny, gripping gangster romp that picks up what Lock, Stock was putting down. It is the platonic ideal of what Ritchie is capable of.
Rory Doherty is a critic and journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work can be found at British GQ, Vulture, Inverse, AV Club, and other publications. He can be found on Twitter/X at @roryhasopinions
