Review: Snatch

      This movie is fun, funny, violent, and complicated. The spiritual follow-up to director Guy Ritchie's earlier film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch deals with the same world of English gangsters and criminals. The pacing is frantic, the plot almost needlessly complex, and the characters have names like Franky Four-fingers, Bullet-Tooth Tony, and Boris the Blade. It's a uniquely British thrill ride, plain and simple.

      I'm unsure I could do an adequate job in describing the plot of this film. There are so many characters and overlapping plots that it becomes almost impossible to recount. There's a diamond heist, underground bare-knuckle boxing matches, which are the main stories in the plot. There are also some kidnappings, some assassins, some dismemberments, a delightful group of incomprehensible gypsies, and a dog that tries to eat everything. It's a manic mish-mash of everything we love about English gangster movies that Guy Ritchie has so perfectly crafted.

     

     Jason Statham is the main character, and is cool to see him in these early roles in which he got his start and made his name the the British tough guy on his way to becoming the action star he is today. However, my favorite actor in this movie is Brad Pitt, the central member of the group of gypsies known as “pikeys” who speak in a near unintelligible dialect, that even confuses the other brits in the movie. This is a nod to the unintelligibility of the cockney dialects to American audiences in Lock, Stock. Brad Pitt here is right during that time in his career where he had just become an A-list actor and was unafraid to be a funny, lovable character. This is a Brad Pitt before the dry seriousness of Bejamin Button and The Tree of Life. This Brad Pitt is more akin to Tyler Durden, it is a shame we don't see this side of Mr. Pitt more often as he does it so well. The last time we saw Pitt like this was 2008's Burn After Reading. Come to think of it, Guy Ritchie has a lot in common stylistically with the Coen Brothers, the Coens are more intellectual, but both directors give us fast, fun movies that take place in these sort of surreal universes. It is a shame that Ritchie's success has caused him to stray away from these types of movies, making things like the much slicker RocknRolla and a complete stylistic departure in the most recent Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr. Guy Ritchie does movies like Snatch, Lock, Stock, and Revolver well and he struggles outside of the gritty, tongue in cheek violence and comedy of his British gangster movies. I hate to typecast him in this way, but until he can prove that he can make different kinds of movies of equal quality, I think it would behoove him to return to his roots. 

Rating: 7.5/10 - Virtuous