‘Duchess’ Review: Neil Marshall’s Charmless Guy Ritchie Rip-Off is a Female Empowerment Forgery

In 1998, Guy Ritchie erupted onto the British cinema scene with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The gangster movie, which in itself took inspiration from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Palme D’Or winner Pulp Fiction, found itself in an unimpeachable position as a strangely immediate cult classic in British culture. Its snappy editing and snarky attitude cemented director Guy Ritchie’s future in Hollywood. In 1998, this was fresh and exciting filmmaking, the type that soon became a blueprint for the genre. But it is 2024, and director Neil Marshall following that Ritchie blueprint means that Duchess is more than just old hat: it’s Patrick Swayze, as the cockney saying goes.

The titular character of Duchess, Scarlett Monoghan (Charlotte Kirk), is a foul-mouthed femme fatale, whose days of contemporary Dickensian pickpocketing are numbered once she falls for ex-marine turned diamond smuggler Robert McNaughton (Philip Winchester). The cliches begin thick and fast in this banal, unoriginal thriller as Duchess opens with Scarlett in lingerie, schmoozing a Russian oligarch as a pretend sex worker before she unceremoniously stabs him in the genitals. Freeze frame. Through a voiceover from Kirk, she begins equating cocks with power before hard-man colleague Danny (Sean Pertwee) attempts to strangle him. Freeze frame. “Actually hang on a minute, we need to go back” Kirk voices, as the film rewinds itself to before she took up the moniker of Duchess.

Around an hour into Duchess, this scene is contextualised. Until then, this is a bog-standard origin story for the film’s often scantily-clad anti-heroine Scarlett. After this, it is your classic revenge tale. This is to say that the film as a whole is riddled with broad genre archetypes of British gangster movies; redundant voiceovers, the cockney hard-man, bold letters splashed on the screen naming the characters, a Russian mob boss, the hispanic maid…even a wild animal held captive underground. 

This is the thing with the whole ordeal that is Duchess: there is not a single idea that is an original manifestation from Marshall or from writing partner Kirk. So what boggles this critic about Duchess being a concoction of tired, stale cliches is the lack of self-awareness about it. The film plays its tropes straight but line readings such as: “if you want to play in a man’s world, you’d better get ready to be fucked in the ass. Because we all look the same from behind” from gruff bad guys would find a comfortable place in a satirist’s version of this story. The film could be funny if it wasn’t such a cruel exercise.

Within Auteur Theory, it is suggested that the director is the sole beneficiary of both praise and criticism. When we intersect this with feminist theory and the Male Gaze for purposes of criticism and analysis, we find that both theories become at war with each other. Scarlett, and laterally the Duchess character, is an embodiment of male idealism: a skinny blonde-haired liquor drinking foul mouth, who is promiscuous, gun-toting and spends a lot of time in bikinis. 

Placing male gaze and auteur theory in the same venn diagram suggests that this is Neil Marshall’s male power fantasy, since the character is removed from agency until over an hour in – often finding herself saved by men – and whose portrayal could be construed as misogynistic. But this was co-written by Kirk herself. Is this, then, a female power fantasy? Does Kirk’s involvement in the script then negate criticism of its misogyny and the male gaze – a fundamental flaw in the theory is its assumed heterosexuality anyway – or is Duchess a product of patriarchal hegemony? If we are to believe this is the latter, then we also negate Kirk’s own autonomy in creating a movie this acrid.

Continuing with Auteur Theory, we then traverse into why attempting to capture a certain directorial style is fundamentally flawed. The films of Guy Ritchie are not just playful with their form, but they have a gritty panache that comes from its dynamite cast. They made household names of Jason Statham and Stephen Graham, while getting charisma magnets like Vinnie Jones and Brad Pitt involved. Even Ritchie’s box office bomb, the spy thriller The Man From U.N.C.L.E, had a sparkling Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer playing off each other to great effect. 

Ritchie’s cast are what makes his films such whirlwinds of charisma. Mimicking that same style, devoid of a cast with individuality and personality, makes Duchess a gruelling, miserable chore to watch; a film faker than its CGI blood. It is an endurance test of juvenility, one where cockney gangsters call each other cunts with a smirk, and diamond smugglers make references to chopping genitalia while thinking it’s being a maximalist challenge to the genre just because it uses diamonds instead of drugs. 

The gangster genre is an embarrassment of riches; Brian DePalma, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, to name but a few, are directors who have found success. But for Marshall, whose career started so promisingly with Dog Soldiers and The Descent, there are no riches here, just embarrassment. A mean, grungy pastiche ripped out of the Guy Ritchie playbook without an ounce of self-awareness that this style was only fresh in 1999. It is the kind of acerbic, faux-edgy chauvinistic storytelling that can only really be enjoyed by lager louts and 10-year-old boys.

Grade: D–

Duchess will be released theatrically in the U.K by Vertigo Films and on VOD in the U.S. by Saban Films on August 9.