Lock, Stock and not much else

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2001)

Guy Ritchie is a tremendous visual director, but someone needs to teach him how to tell a story. Snatch is a shallow, undisciplined, poorly structured piece of work. Undeniably, its very entertaining but a little more substance is needed in order to make great cinema and Snatch does not provide it.
The film is so unstructured that even the trailer and the video description fail to accurately synopsise this music video of a film. If you are a product of the MTV generation and have little more than a three-second attention span then you'll probably like it, but I couldn't possibly sit through it again because there cannot be anything more for me to see.
Like Lock, Stock this film is a classic triumph of style over substance and like Lock, Stock it left me feeling like I'd seen the work of an adolescent schoolboy. Snatch was ultimately frustrating in that - not unlike Pulp Fiction - it presented a number of great ideas that in themselves would have made good films but failed to adequately explore any one idea to a fulfilling conclusion.
On the positive side, I liked Jason Statham's performance and I particularly like his real life girlfriend. Brad Pitt was a revelation as the totally incoherent "One punch" Mickey and the comedic aspects of the film worked very well. The plotting, however, though initially fairly tight developed into little more than a series of sketches based upon the loose theme of the stolen diamonds. Hence, my feeling that I was watching an immature piece of work. A less visual and more plot driven director could have made Snatch into a funny yet gritty drama on the pursuit of the diamonds by the various criminal elements. Instead we're given a hotchpotch of, funny, but loose ideas and very, very violent sketches giving an overall impression that's massively different from the impression we're given from the trailer. I found it very disappointing.
I have to apologise to all the people who have written positive comments on this film and also to instruct the bloke who's seen it sixteen times to get a life, but the movie Snatch has much less to it than meets the eye.