RocknRolla
Saturday, September 13, 2:30pm
Ryerson Theatre
Guy Ritchie is back doing gangster films and, sadly, that’s not a good thing. You couldn’t have a more wildly misleading opening to a movie review then that last sentence.
Ritchie’s last film, Revolver, was sadly denied a movie screen experience for North American audiences and we are all the poorer for it. An inspiring analysis of the human mind the film only recently showed up in bargain bins where it quietly went unnoticed except by the most dedicated film buffs. So perhaps that’s why Ritchie has chosen to retreat to more familiar subject matter, as an attempt to regain the buzz and counter-culture sensibilities of his earlier efforts.
Enter RocknRolla.
The film stars a veritable hodge podge of quirky personalities, played by everyone from A-list types on their way up the celebrity ladder (Gerard Butler), to venerable character actors (Tom Wilkinson) and attractive femme fatales (Thandie Newton). Trying to summarize the plot of this labyrinthine story in a few short sentences is a masochistic job meant for those with bigger brains then I posses. To call it a gangster film about the changing nature of organized crime is like saying War and Peace is a book about some ‘stuff that went down in Russia.’
RocknRolla deals with the fallout of London’s skyrocketing property values. Europe’s nouveau riche has descended on the city and the only way they can get permission to erect their new building is by linking arm’s with the local wheeler dealer types, led by big fish Wilkinson, to help grease the wheels of an intransigent bureaucracy. Butler leads a group of little fish, affectionately named the Wild Bunch, that get caught up in Wilkinson’s shady deals and unknowingly complicate matters by pinching some money that doesn’t belong to them. In the end, almost everyone involved is trying to track down an oft referenced, but never seen, ‘lucky’ painting, in a homage cribbed directly from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction playbook.
RocknRolla lacks the punch of Ritchie’s previous gangster films, the modern classic Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells and Snatch, not because RR is a bad film or even a weaker film. Rather, it’s been eight years since a Ritchie gangster film last graced the big screen and since that time a genre of filmmaking he’d help reinvigorate has become so popular that his work seems less original and groundbreaking as a result. Nothing succeeds like success.
Ritchie continues to push the genre as far as he can, with his top drawer writing, editing and direction. And even though you’ll leave the theatre impressed with the results, you can’t help but think that you’ve seen it all before.
Apparently he’s written a sequel to this film, The Real RocknRolla or some such nonsense, which he alludes to in the end credits with a James Bondian-like flourish. I think the biggest vote of confidence that I can offer RocknRolla, is that I’d be very interested in checking out what comes after.
Showing posts with label Guy Ritchie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guy Ritchie. Show all posts
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Movie Review: Revolver
Oh man,
There’s busy and then there’s busy. I’ve got so many half-written posts in the hopper I’m starting to wonder if I might have ADD. There are wedding updates, movie reviews, new album reviews and about three weeks worth of comics reviews that are now massively out of date.
But instead of taking the time to clear some of these things up, I’m going to devote my lunch hour to reviewing a film that’s almost three years old, that I just saw last night.
You want current and relevant? Read a paper. I give you whatever is kicking around in my head at the moment.
So today I’m going to review Revolver.
Revolver is Guy Ritchie’s third film and I first heard of it about three years ago when it was playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Unfortunately, due to the eternal scheduling dance that always accompanies film fests I wasn’t able to see it then. I wasn’t too worried because I figured that after the success of Snatch and Lock, Stock… that Revolver was likely to show up at my local Cineplex before too long.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Revolver winged its way silently back across the pond, opened for European audiences and then went quietly went to video, never bothering to open up in North America. Hardly a ringing endorsement for must-see status.
But when I saw it on the videostore shelf on Saturday, I couldn’t help myself. I was in the mood for some stylized violence and I’d already pigeonholed Guy Ritchie as a director with more sizzle than steak.
After watching this film, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Now I’ll be honest. The bulk of this movie is somewhat incomprehensible. On one level it’s a fairly straightforward gangster flick, full of bloodletting, drug dealing and power struggles only grafted onto an unseen story that feels much…bigger. Jason Statham plays the cryptic Jake Green, a gambler and a con man recently released from prison and looking to enact revenge on the man who put him there, Macha (Ray Liotta). However, Jake’s plans go awry when he discovers that he has a rare blood disease that only gives him days to live. In desperation he turns to Zach and Avi, two mysterious loan sharks who promise to help him if he offers his complete obedience.
There’s something off about this movie, something that you can feel from the first scene but you can’t put your finger on it. It’s clear the film is strictly following its own internal logic, but as the viewer I had a hard time understanding what that logic may be.
S and I went through, and discarded, half a dozen possible theories…
“Jake is dead…or in a coma”
“Zach and Avi are angels”
“Zach and Avi are demons”
“Jake is a big crime lord”
“Jake is creating the world around him, just like Dark City”
In the end the big twist is both much simpler and yet far more complicated than any theory we were able to come up with. I was reminded of Fight Club in the sense that you can completely re-interpret every previous scene in film after the climatic big reveal. It made me instantly want to watch the whole movie again, from the start, just so I could look at it through a new perspective and that NEVER happens to me.
I know from some of the special features on the disc that Guy Ritchie had to re-edit several key scenes. He was intimately familiar with the unspoken twist that underpinned the whole film and had to strike a delicate balance between giving the audience enough information to keep them interested and giving them too much information and blowing the payoff. I think, in the end he managed to strike the appropriate balance as best he could.
If I have any criticism of the film its that I spent too much time trying to part the surface story and discover the hidden messages underneath. The surface plot, while engaging, clearly exists only to serve the needs of the hidden philosophical themes. And while the payoff at the end makes it all worthwhile it can be a little trying to make it through the often murky gangster story to achieve that brilliant moment of clarity.
But on the whole Guy Ritchie made me think more about this film than I ever thought would be possible. It’s a shame that it never made it into North American theatres as audiences are definitely missing out on something special.
Well played Guy. Well played.
BONUS REVIEW: This just in. The title of the new Indiana Jones movie has been changed to Indiana Jones and the Fourth Straight Movie Ruined by George Lucas.
No word of a lie.
There’s busy and then there’s busy. I’ve got so many half-written posts in the hopper I’m starting to wonder if I might have ADD. There are wedding updates, movie reviews, new album reviews and about three weeks worth of comics reviews that are now massively out of date.
But instead of taking the time to clear some of these things up, I’m going to devote my lunch hour to reviewing a film that’s almost three years old, that I just saw last night.
You want current and relevant? Read a paper. I give you whatever is kicking around in my head at the moment.
So today I’m going to review Revolver.
Revolver is Guy Ritchie’s third film and I first heard of it about three years ago when it was playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Unfortunately, due to the eternal scheduling dance that always accompanies film fests I wasn’t able to see it then. I wasn’t too worried because I figured that after the success of Snatch and Lock, Stock… that Revolver was likely to show up at my local Cineplex before too long.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Revolver winged its way silently back across the pond, opened for European audiences and then went quietly went to video, never bothering to open up in North America. Hardly a ringing endorsement for must-see status.
But when I saw it on the videostore shelf on Saturday, I couldn’t help myself. I was in the mood for some stylized violence and I’d already pigeonholed Guy Ritchie as a director with more sizzle than steak.
After watching this film, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Now I’ll be honest. The bulk of this movie is somewhat incomprehensible. On one level it’s a fairly straightforward gangster flick, full of bloodletting, drug dealing and power struggles only grafted onto an unseen story that feels much…bigger. Jason Statham plays the cryptic Jake Green, a gambler and a con man recently released from prison and looking to enact revenge on the man who put him there, Macha (Ray Liotta). However, Jake’s plans go awry when he discovers that he has a rare blood disease that only gives him days to live. In desperation he turns to Zach and Avi, two mysterious loan sharks who promise to help him if he offers his complete obedience.
There’s something off about this movie, something that you can feel from the first scene but you can’t put your finger on it. It’s clear the film is strictly following its own internal logic, but as the viewer I had a hard time understanding what that logic may be.
S and I went through, and discarded, half a dozen possible theories…
“Jake is dead…or in a coma”
“Zach and Avi are angels”
“Zach and Avi are demons”
“Jake is a big crime lord”
“Jake is creating the world around him, just like Dark City”
In the end the big twist is both much simpler and yet far more complicated than any theory we were able to come up with. I was reminded of Fight Club in the sense that you can completely re-interpret every previous scene in film after the climatic big reveal. It made me instantly want to watch the whole movie again, from the start, just so I could look at it through a new perspective and that NEVER happens to me.
I know from some of the special features on the disc that Guy Ritchie had to re-edit several key scenes. He was intimately familiar with the unspoken twist that underpinned the whole film and had to strike a delicate balance between giving the audience enough information to keep them interested and giving them too much information and blowing the payoff. I think, in the end he managed to strike the appropriate balance as best he could.
If I have any criticism of the film its that I spent too much time trying to part the surface story and discover the hidden messages underneath. The surface plot, while engaging, clearly exists only to serve the needs of the hidden philosophical themes. And while the payoff at the end makes it all worthwhile it can be a little trying to make it through the often murky gangster story to achieve that brilliant moment of clarity.
But on the whole Guy Ritchie made me think more about this film than I ever thought would be possible. It’s a shame that it never made it into North American theatres as audiences are definitely missing out on something special.
Well played Guy. Well played.
BONUS REVIEW: This just in. The title of the new Indiana Jones movie has been changed to Indiana Jones and the Fourth Straight Movie Ruined by George Lucas.
No word of a lie.
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