Has a film ever tried harder to be cool?

Rating: 4/10 (27 September 2016)

"Snatch" is a British English-language film from 2000, so it is already over 15 years old. The writer and director is Guy Ritchie and this film came out shortly before he married Madonna. The cast includes many known names, such as Oscar winners Brad Pitt and Benicio Del Toro, action film superstar Jason Statham, the late Dennis Farina and former football player Vinnie Jones. This 105-minute is as fast as it gets for a film and this is certainly not to everybody's liking (including myself). I found the camera work (i.e. the constant switches and movements) fairly distracting. The characters are all very much in your face, so Ritchie and the actors definitely wanted to make sure you remember them. But how about writing them properly instead? Giving them interesting background stories and making them memorable this (much more subtle) way? Now that would be something, wouldn't it? And that also certainly requires much more skill when it comes to writing screenplays compared to just letting everybody shout at each other for the entire film, even if the path Ritchie took at least resulted in a handful fairly memorable quotes.
In the heart of a story there is a precious (priceless actually) diamond most of the characters are after. And with characters, I could also say criminals as absolutely everybody in here has gotten his hands dirty one way or another. This includes all kinds of robberies, brawls, illegal fighting, blackmailing and even murder. The latter also includes the scene I found the funniest. (Actually I did not find too many scenes funny in here I have to admit, it mostly seemed pretty try-hard to me.) I am talking about a scene where one guy shoots another and the guy hit by the bullet keeps insulting the guy who shot at him. And this goes on and on. Another bullet, another insult, another shot, another insult etc. He just didn't want to die it seems and told him frankly and openly what he thought of him. This scene was laugh-out-loud hilarious. But it was really the only one and there aren't too many entertaining sequences in here. Still, comedy was probably the film's biggest strength as storytelling and character development were really weak in my opinion. Ritchie had a fairly decent cast here and I found it pretty underwhelming what he made of it. This film is actually among the IMDb top250 films and this is truly baffling as this film does not have any substance (besides drugs) or depth whatsoever. I guess this film has many fanboys rooting for it (I believe it actually is a very male-oriented film with the cast and story) and these do not care about all the important aspects I already mentioned that this film lacks. I personally give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.