Narrowing Guy Ritchie down to six is a hiding to nothing. Here are six Guy Ritchie movies to stream in New Zealand tonight, picked around the two series he has coming back: The Gentlemen on Netflix on Thursday 3 September, and MobLand on Paramount+ on Friday 18 September.
He has been at this since 1998 and the hit rate is the actual problem. Six slots means no The Man from U.N.C.L.E., no RocknRolla, no Operation Fortune, no Wrath of Man, and no Aladdin, the billion-dollar one. Some are not streaming here anyway, so availability quietly did some of the cutting. It is the last weekend of winter and the lounge is still cold enough to sit through a few.
Nobody in a Guy Ritchie movie knows what they are doing
That is why these landed here. Every character is out of their depth and not one of them will say so. The card player who cannot count. The dealers certain they are hard. The bloke who knows a bloke who can sort it, and does not. They hold the straight face right up to the moment it goes wrong, and a good while after.
It is a familiar way to carry on. Lock, Stock and Snatch sat on the DVD shelf of every student flat in Dunedin and got quoted badly at the pub by people doing the accent. Heroes were never really the draw here. A man confidently making it worse, though: we all know one.
September is the month he takes over the TV
The Gentlemen comes back on Thursday 3 September, all eight episodes at once, so there is no weekly wait to argue about. Netflix ordered a third season before this one aired, which is either confidence or something they know that we do not.
MobLand season two starts on Friday 18 September on Paramount+, ten episodes weekly through to a finale on 20 November, per Paramount's announcement for New Zealand and Australia. Check which app first: season one sits on Prime Video here, not Paramount+, so the flat that binged it last year opens a different one.
- Cold start: the 2020 Gentlemen movie on Netflix, then the series, then MobLand on Prime Video.
- Thursday 3 September: The Gentlemen season two, Netflix, all eight episodes at once.
- Friday 18 September: MobLand season two, Paramount+, weekly through to 20 November.
Where to stream Guy Ritchie movies in New Zealand
Here is the odd part: the movies that made him are easier to watch from here than from home. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels has no UK streaming home at all right now. Here it is free on ThreeNow, and Sherlock Holmes is free on TVNZ+. The country that supplied the accents cannot press play on the first one, and we can, for nothing, on an app the TV has had installed and ignored for years.
The newest one leads the list: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, on Prime Video. Everything below streams in New Zealand tonight on something the flat already pays for. No rentals. That is the rule here and in the app: if you cannot press play tonight, it does not count. Which is why RocknRolla and Wrath of Man are missing.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Henry Cavill and a unit of official misfits blowing up Nazi supply boats, based on a real and genuinely daft wartime operation. Ritchie doing his crew-of-chancers trick with a bigger budget and no London postcode.
The Gentlemen
Theo James inherits a title, an estate and a very large weed operation underneath it. Season one is the ideal warm-up before season two lands on 3 September.
MobLand
Tom Hardy fixing problems for a London crime family, with Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren enjoying themselves enormously. Season one is on Prime Video here; season two moves to Paramount+ on 18 September.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
The one that started it. A card game goes wrong and four mates owe half a million to a man who removes fingers. Free on ThreeNow, so there is genuinely no excuse.
Snatch
A stolen diamond, an unlicensed boxer nobody can understand, and a dog that swallows a squeaker. Still the funniest thing he has made.
Sherlock Holmes
Honourable mention
Not a gangster in sight, and free on TVNZ+. Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law bickering through Victorian London, with the same editing tricks Ritchie uses on the crime stuff.
How Guy Ritchie went from £800,000 to a billion
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels cost about £800,000 and took $28.4 million worldwide, per The Numbers. The BFI credits it with reviving the British gangster genre, then notes that most of what copied it was unwatchable. The honest version: one good idea, and a decade of people borrowing the freeze-frames.
The casting is the part worth knowing. Jason Statham got his first film role off a street market stall. Vinnie Jones was a footballer with no acting behind him, per MentalFloss and FilmInk. On Snatch, Brad Pitt was already cast when the accent went sideways in production, and the unintelligible delivery everyone quotes was agreed the night before shooting, per SlashFilm. Nobody making it was any surer than the characters are.
Then he had a shocker: five Razzies for Swept Away in 2002, Worst Director among them, and a Rotten Tomatoes consensus on Revolver of incoherent misfire. He rebuilt as a studio director: Sherlock Holmes did $524 million in 2009, and Aladdin cleared $1.054 billion in 2019, his biggest by a distance, per Box Office Mojo.
Spotting game: he has put himself in two of his own movies, the man reading the newspaper in Snatch and the inn owner in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, both uncredited, per IMDb. Neither is much of a part. He is not that sort of show-off.
And now the TV. The Gentlemen movie became the Netflix series, and MobLand was created by Ronan Bennett for Paramount+ with Ritchie directing the opener.
Six titles, four apps, one standoff
Six Ritchie titles spread across four apps is exactly how a night ends up back on Shortland Street with nobody admitting they gave up. The best movie apps for couples rundown covers why swiping together beats taking turns, and if the problem is tonight rather than the month ahead, what to watch tonight in New Zealand is the short version.
Most of the standoff is nobody saying which one they actually want. A 1998 crime comedy and a wartime commando raid are not the same evening.
Swipe the six separately and put on whatever you both said yes to. That is the set of Guy Ritchie movies to stream in New Zealand right now, rentals excluded, with the first series back on Thursday 3 September. MatchWatch is free to use. Available in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the United States.