Ritchie out does his previous effort and provides us with plenty more escapist gangster shenanigans with Snatch.

Rating: 10/10 (5 September 2008)

I can remember seeing Snatch. for the first time and being a little confused; it didn't help that I saw it on commercial television and frequently had the then what seemed to be complicated narrative broken up by advertisement breaks. Since then I've seen it several times, uninterrupted, and it's just the sort of film that grows on you. The film is funny, it moves at an enjoyable pace but includes its fair share of long takes cranking up the bizarre atmosphere it has and most of the scenes are accompanied with some brilliant dialogue. This is classed as a British gangster film, despite its post-modern touches, but I feel it can hold it's own up there with the greats of the genre in that respective cannon.
The funny thing with Ritchie's gangster films is that they rely on that message of entertainment. Ritchie's films are not about deranged and disgruntled post Second World War youths alá Brighton Rock and nor are they about fish-out-of-water individuals travelling to far off places to do battle against pornography and murder alá Get Carter  neither do they attempt to tackle issues to do with Britain as a whole such as the rise in prostitution (Mona Lisa) and globalisation twinned with the threat of the IRA (The Long Good Friday). No, Ritchie's gangster films carry an air of escapism rather than realism and very much keep the gangster in the world of their own, very much fixed on problems of their own.
In its essence, Snatch. is similar to Ritchie's prior film Lock, Stock in the sense its about a collection of individuals whom are in debt to a more powerful, more ruthless criminal. That criminal here is Brick Top (Ford) and he is much more menacing than Hatchet Harry. The persons in debt are Tommy (Graham) and Turkish (Statham), a twosome instead of a foursome as seen in Lock, Stock. Then there are the little connections you spot such as Boris (Serbedzija) being able to 'get anything you like' similarly to Nick the Greek in Lock, Stock and the visual approach of the fancy transitions and thoroughly amusing voiceovers.
Snatch. plays out like a noir infused electric shock; opening up with a voice-over in a gloomy room by the lead character and then hopping around sending us on a long and complicated journey which adopts a multi-strand approach. But this is not a pulpy detective story, even though it has several characters chasing a specific object, and it is not a study of seduction and betrayal. Snatch. covers a diamond heist and the resulting jewel getting mixed up in the crazy world Ritchie creates but more-so focuses on the two individuals of Turkish and Tommy in their ongoing struggle with Brick Top.
If the British gangster genre relies on gritty realism and hard as nails characters wading through a seedy and down right nasty location in search of the truth then Snatch. perhaps ignores this and adopts the aesthetic of escapism. Erratic subtitles shoot across the screen to the sound effects of mock pistols firing; split screen telephone conversations that pop up and retreat again when someone speaks and wired crash zooms on the text written on the side of guns accompanied with bizarre sound effects make up this gangster film. Snatch. is not set in Newcastle circa 1971 what with its seacoal dispatchers and its chimneys and factories; nor is it post Second World War Brighton with its grimy looking streets covered in terrace housing and racecourses that turn into switchblade death-traps as a superpower struggles to re-build after the war. Snatch. is proud of where it's set and a lot of the grimy locations are accompanied with music that sounds sarcastic, the scene in which Tommy and George approach the Pikey campsite being one. Along with this, it has the audacity to make it all seem very funny.
Two such examples where Ritchie suspends all reality in this film occur when an American diamond dealer is on the phone to the man that stole it, who is at a tailors - he is seen in several different outfits in very quick succession which is obviously impossible. The second example of which manipulates time in an equally carefree manner happens when Turkish explains hare coursing to Tommy  their conversation takes place over a series of cuts spanning three locations that I can only assume would've taken a fair amount of time to cover; it begs the question what they spoke about during the in-between cuts. The conversation starts at the campsite, covers the car journey and ends in a muddy field somewhere as Turkish explains something in very little time.
But Snatch. will remain one of my favourite films; a sort of escapist gangster film that ties in elements of the gangster-heavy thanks to Brick Top's character but keeps the mood relatively light with characters you're not supposed to understand and others whose hapless journey through the underworld will see them in body bags; holding up a bounty hunter in a pub letting off extra loud blanks in moving vehicles. It's fast, it's abruptly named, it's quotable and it's one of my favourite films ever made.