The most pretentious film I've seen in a long time

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2001)

I really did like Guy Ritchie's debut "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", but "Snatch" is really over the top. It has some funny moments, but all in all, this is not a good movie.
First off, as many critics and viewers alike have citied, this is pretty much the same movie as "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". I'm sure people who liked this film will argue that I'm wrong and that's just a generalization, but the two films are so alike, its not even funny.
Secondly, Ritchie has taken his "hip" style to the utter extreme, here. I enjoyed the way Ritchie subtly used his quirky camera effects and quick shots in 'Lock Stock', but the key word here is "subtly". In "Snatch", he goes for the overkill and the whole movie ends up feeling like a 90 minute music video. It was so bad that I honestly felt like walking out of the theater only 10 minutes into this film. The whole film felt like a giant forced exercise in pseudo-coolness for the MTV generation. Christ, I was surprised not to see Kurt Loader or Carson Daily standing anywhere in the film, holding a microphone with screaming fans in the background. As you can expect from this description, it is filled with so many shots that just scream "Hey, look at me. I'm Guy Ritchie. Look how cool this shot is. I'm so cool". Reminded a lot of that modernized "Romeo and Juliet" movie that came out 4 or 5 years ago (with DiCaprio and Claire Danes). It's dumbed down, wannabe slick, cool and hip entertainment for people who like to think they are above, say "Dude, Where's My Car?" or "Scary Movie", but are certainly well below the works of David Mamet or The Coen Brothers.
Thirdly, this film seems very stereotypical to British culture. I would be very surprised a British born director would give his characters such fake brit/cockney tripe dialogue if I wasn't already aware that this film was so obviously made with an American audience in mind. I would also have a very hard time believing Guy Ritchie was really British at all and wasn't just an American posing as a Brit if it weren't for the fact that his American characters in this film were just as fake and badly stereotyped. Brad Pitt wasn't half as bad as I thought he would be, but he certainly wasn't funny, unless you happened to be a North American male in Junior High that still thinks that a stereotyped British accent alone is funny enough. And Benecio Del Toro's fake (insert nationality here of which I honestly can't remember in the slightest) accent was even worse, in my humble opinion.
That's not to say this was a really bad film. I did laugh several times and enjoyed the scene's with that big, tall, brute hit-man guy that was also in 'Lock Stock', but all in all, this was a very pretentious and useless re-hash of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and I'm not impressed with the masturbatory filmmaking direction Ritchie has taken. I'm aware that Ritchie was a TV Ad director before deciding he was a filmmaking protege, but that doesn't give him an excuse for making a film like a TV Ad (let's just hope that Spike Jonze doesn't make the same mistake). Nothing worse than a show-off filmmaker, just ask Brian DePalma's and Oliver Stone's critics. I give it a 5/10.