Dir.: Guy Ritchie

"For every action, there is a reaction. And a Pikey reaction... is quite a fucking thing."

Is Guy Ritchie a stylistic provocateur or a slyboots looter of Quentin Tarantino's filmic footlocker? Only his barber (and perhaps his wife) know for sure. What is certain is that Snatch, Ritchie's follow-up to his smash hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was always likely to polarize the critical camps, as it has till this day. Its hyper-violent comic bloodshed is sure to offend some, while others will embrace the film's ferocious editing and manic, rocket-fuelled pace (courtesy of editors Jon Harris and Les Healey). I, personally, fucking love it.



One of the greatest things about this film is Tim Maurice-Jones' snappy, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink cinematography. Snatch is nothing if not watchable: It has the insane, popcorn rhythms of a Road Runner cartoon, and for that reason alone it's a minor masterpiece. Never have so many characters done so much damage to each other with such an interesting assortment of ordnance. In this respect the film echoes the wild excesses of the gangsterific shoot-'em-ups arriving from Hong Kong circa 1990. It's John Woo minus the thieves' code of honour, transposed to modern-day comic-Cockney London.

In other ways, Snatch also updates classic British heist comedies such as Charles Crichton's celebrated The Lavender Hill Mob - no Alec Guinness, of course, but we do get Vinnie Jones again and an incomprehensible hilarious Brad Pitt. It's almost a fair trade. Like Ritchie's previous film, Snatch revolves around a spindly series of often-confusing storylines that eventually meet up and pay off, big-time, in the final reel. There's the unlicensed boxing-match promoters Turkish (Jason Statham, who also narrates the proceedings) and Tommy (Stephen Graham), who run afoul of vicious bastard Brick Top (Alan Ford) when their fighter takes a permanent dive into oblivion. In his place, they enlist the aid of Irish Gypsy bare-knuckles boxer Mickey O'Neil (Pitt), a fast-talking schemer with a penchant for first-round KO's.

Then there's Avi (Dennis Farina), a New York-based diamond importer on the trail of a 84-carat super-rock stolen from Antwerp by gambling-obsessed Frankie Four-Fingers (Benicio Del Toro). Avi, his British connection Doug the Head (Mike Reid), and a trio of East-London lowlifes (Lennie James, Robbie Gee, Ade) are all involved in the race for this mighty chunk of inanimate carbon against the legendary Uzbek psycho-killer Boris the Blade (Rade Serbedzija), who, like everyone else in Snatch, wants the rock for himself. Then there's Jones' Bullet Tooth Tony, a dapper fixer of other people's problems who has an eye toward mayhem. And how many characters did I just fucking mention?

All of these people - and what seems like a thousand more - make for a highly entertaining film, part broad comic farce and part grisly charnel house humour. Farina's Avi is a ripe, mythmaking part, and Pitt, an actor who can seemingly do no wrong, even in crappy Hollywood fare, manages both hilarity and horror (frequently in the same scene). Ritchie pulls out all the stops with Snatch - the film has (rightly) been compared to Lock, Stock, although it certainly feels as though Ritchie is trying to top himself here, and to his credit (and my amazement) he does.

Snatch is a tighter, more resilient film than its predecessor in every way right down to the opening titles. It reminds me of when a young Aussie wunderkind named George Miller pulled off the unthinkable and topped Mad Max with the exuberantly psychotic The Road Warrior. I've said it before and I'll say it again: THAT's entertainment!

"Lock, stock, the fuckin' lot."

When Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels came out a decade ago, it was already a tremendous hit in its native England. Irreverent, violent and wickedly clever, Guy Ritchie's turbo-charged debut is a wild, kinetic take on the traditional caper film, one that takes the conventions of the genre and gives them a decidedly UK twist - Johnny Rotten circa 1977 couldn't have directed a more joyously obnoxious bit of tomfoolery.



With a plot as convoluted as the East-Ender accents that pepper the production (as in Trainspotting, subtitles are sporadically necessary here), Ritchie and a spot-on cast of mostly newcomers steamroll through the proceedings at a cool 210 kilometers per second. At least that's what it seems like, given the director's penchant for including presumably every one of his stylistic tricks within the frame (and frequently within the same shot - slow motion, speeded-up action, skewed angles, bizarre opticals, and anything else he can think of).

The story centers around four London friends - Eddie (Nick Moran), Tom (Jason Flemyng), Bacon (Jason Stratham), and Soap (Dexter Fletcher) - who go in on an illegal card game hoping to double their money. Unbeknownst to ringer Eddie, the game is rigged, and he not only loses the group's initial investment, but he also ends up owing cantankerous crime boss Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty) an extra 500,000 pounds. With Harry's vicious debt collector Big Chris (Vinnie Jones, making his acting debut, at 33, when he was still playing football for Wimbledon F.C.) on their tail, not to mention the entirely evil, disturbingly silent Barry the Baptist (Lenny McLean), the boys have to raise the offending amount or end up floating face down in the drink.

Any number of sub-plots litter Ritchie's film like shell casings: The boys' next-door neighbours, led by the spotty, dotty Winston (Steven Mackintosh), fancy themselves world-class drug dealers (they're far too high on ganja to get much work done, though) and scheme to rip off local kingpin Rory Breaker (Vas Blackwood), while Barry the Baptist is off on his own mission to secure a pair of antique hunting rifles for his boss. Add to that flashbacks, flash-forwards, and any number of one-off gags, and what you come up with is a film almost too British to swallow without the aid of a frothy pint of lager.

For all its impenetrable rhyming slang, though, Lock, Stock is a breathtaking debut that recalls the hyperstylized violence of Tarantino melded with the classic British caper comedies of Ealing Studios. With such a frenetic, brain-melting load of images to ponder, it's easy to forget that there are also some terrific actors at work here, not the least of whom is the amazing Vinnie Jones. As Big Chris, he's not only a deadly, leather-jacketed killer in the service of the Bad Guys, but also a devoted dad who brings his young son, Little Chris, along for every round of GBH. It's these kinds of heartwarming touches that nail Ritchie and Lock, Stock as two shivs in a gullet, violent visionaries with audacious, outrageous senses of humour as well.

"People ask the question... what's a RocknRolla? And I tell 'em - it's not about drugs, drums, and hospital drips, oh no. There's more there than that, my friend. We all like a bit of the good life - some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour, or the fame. But a RocknRolla, oh, he's different. Why? Because a real RocknRolla wants the fucking lot."



If there's a director working today more fascinated by the kinetic and unapologetic joys of lawlessness than Guy Ritchie, I'd love to hear his or her name. It's hard to imagine anyone else so keen on reducing the perils and proceeds of the criminal lifestyle to pure consequence-free, hyper-stylized pop. In Ritchie's breakneck world, psychological motivation and emotional ambiguity are as scarce as the cops, and yet somehow he manages to inject enough wit, aesthetic imagination, and unbridled enthusiasm into his films to keep them from sliding into mindless commercialism. That, my friends, is why I'm a fan.

Ritchie's latest is an in-spirit sequel to his earlier London-gangster comedies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, which might just be a nice way of saying that he's now made the same film three times. Anyway, you'd be forgiven for thinking so, as all the classic Ritchie tropes are present: the herky-jerky editing, the sequences of extended cartoon violence set to the sounds of Eighties ska music, the improbable mutual acquaintanceship that permeates his imaginary criminal underworld, and the witty narration that plays like a voice-over to a nature documentary, presenting in colourful detail the ecosystem of modern-day British film-gangsterism, as if London were a watering hole and all its thugs, snitches, bosses, torturers, thieves, and junkies were merely animals fighting for their spot in nature's hierarchy: "Behold the Russian mob boss, most dangerous of all God's creatures!"

And thank God for that narration because the plot of RocknRolla is so convoluted it would take more words than I have here to encapsulate it. Suffice it to say that it involves brutish mobsters, political corruption, a couple of high-profile robberies, lots of guns, lots of swearing, a femme fatale accountant, an ultraviolent rock star, an infinite number of fancy outfits and shiny cars, a criminal savant with a taste for the films of Merchant Ivory, and a stolen painting that everyone is looking for (just like the rifles in Lock, Stock and the diamond in Snatch).

To say more would be to open a can and let the worms inside spill out onto the floor and slither off in a dozen different directions, never to be corralled again. Better instead just to sit back and enjoy RocknRolla for what it is: a fast-paced amoral joyride that's more interested in the absurdities of violent criminality (torture by crayfish, anyone?) than the complications of real life. Ritchie can keep this type of flick coming for the next twenty years, that I'll keep enjoying the shit out of them.

Far from what Ritchie can and has done, but at least focused on what he's good at, and no Swept Away nonsense.

One of the worst films of the century!