Guy Ritchie has, if we’re being completely honest, always been a hit-or-miss director. Of course, his earliest films – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch – deserve their places in film history. And while I’ll admit to being a fan of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., his Sherlock Holmes was a hot mess. And while yes, he directed last year’s live-action remake of Aladdin, that was so much a Disney film that he didn’t really leave his mark on it at all.

The problem with starting your career on such a high note, as he did, is that people tend to forget the failures (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) and continue to set expectations based on those first two films.

When you add in an A-list cast that includes the likes of Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell, Henry Golding, and Hugh Grant, how can you go into the theater and not expect to see something great?

But unfortunately, despite all of that pedigree, The Gentlemen fails to live up to those expectations. It is, in the end, a paint-by-numbers gangster movie that takes no risks, offers little entertainment value, and is marred by sexist and racist stereotypes.

The movie centers around a top marijuana dealer in London, played by McConaughey. No, he doesn’t (thankfully) try to do an accent – his backstory is that he’s an American who came to England as a Rhodes scholar and decided to stay. But he’s reached middle age now and has decided to sell out his enterprise to his top rival, played by character actor Jeremy Strong, in the hopes of retiring to a quiet life with his wife, Michelle Dockery. But along the way, they have to deal with a Chinese gang run by Henry Golding.

Ritchie doesn’t tell the story as a straight narrative. It becomes clear that this is a device to try to hide the fact that the main story is so weak it couldn’t carry the movie by itself. So instead, he structures the story around a unscrupulous private detective, played by Hugh Grant, who narrates the plot as a way of proving to McConaughey’s top lieutenant, Charlie Hunnam, that he knows enough to bring the whole operation crashing down and thus is deserving of a 20-million pound bribe.

You may have noted by now that I haven’t mentioned a single character’s name yet. There’s a good reason for that: without looking stuff up on IMDb, I’m not sure I could tell you any of their names. I’m pretty sure someone was named Mickey, and Golding is only ever referred to by a never-explained nickname. But mostly, there aren’t any characters in the movie at all. Rather, we only have archetypes: Wealthy and Probably Good-Hearted Drug Dealer, Rival Evil Drug Dealer, Drug Dealer’s Heavy, Immoral P.I., and the like.

And as if not bothering to flesh out his characters wasn’t bad enough, Ritchie also makes sure to maintain a few gender and racial stereotypes as well. While Dockery’s character is shown to be running a successful business, her role in the film is purely to be Beautiful Emotional Support for Main Drug Dealer. In the end, as strong as she appears to be, she also ends up as little more than a damsel in distress as Ritchie throws in a particular egregious scene of violence against her that is absolutely unnecessary and not even in line with everything that has been established about the character perpetrating the act. It exists solely to remind audiences that in this world, male toxicity is still the only real thing that still matters.

Also telling: Dockery is the only woman in the entire film who has more than a few lines of dialogue, and she only barely gets more than a few lines herself.

And then there’s the Chinese gang. Of course, it’s run by an older Chinese man who lives entirely in Chinese surroundings – the Chinese restaurant that is his gang headquarters and a Chinese shrine where he conducts meetings (out in a public space, in London, the most-surveiled city in the world).

Unlike our antihero McConaughey, who peddles his harmless Mary Jane (and who fools himself into thinking that his violent business practices are no big deal), the Chinese gang peddles the really deadly stuff – crack and heroin. The gang is also shown to be involved with human trafficking, just in case you weren’t entirely clear that the nonwhite people were the real bad guys here.

Within minutes of the film’s opening, you will start to get the feeling that maybe you’ve seen this movie before, because you have. Dozens of times. Ritchie takes absolutely no risks. Nothing happens in the movie that isn’t clearly broadcast beforehand and that hasn’t been done a thousand times in a thousand previous gangster movies anyway.

Oh, but there was one very big warning in all of this. It’s a warning that should have made it clear just what was happening, and that this was going to be another Sherlock Holmes rather than a return to the Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels days of yore. You see, there’s no way the studio would have dumped the next Smoking Barrels entry on Ritchie’s resume in the dead zone that is January. The fact that they did release it now should have told me everything I needed to know about the movie before walking in. I don’t know why I let my January release expectations be overruled by the Guy Ritchie expectations, but that one’s me.