Doesn't quite live up to the hype

Rating: 7/10 (3 September 2000)

I guess like most people I really liked Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels so my expectations were very high for Snatch. After all Guy Ritchie had managed to recruit two of my favourite American actors in Brad Pitt and Dennis Farina. However it seems that my expectations were a little too high. There is so much to commend this film, the acting on the whole is very good, Brad Pitt being particularly worthy of note and Vinnie Jones given a little more depth with Bullet Tooth Tony than he was with Big Chris, but having said that I found it very hard going at times, especially when the cockney gangsters were around. I know it's a comedy (and Ritchie's script provides plenty of laughs) but gangsters are supposed to be hard! There's just something about a cockney accent to me that makes it seem, I don't know, comical I guess. Bricktop lacks the menace of the villains in Lock, Stock and you have to wonder how he got into such a position in the first place. The direction is clever, particularly the opening sequence but it leaves me slightly cold. It's too stylised and reminds me more of adverts than it should, though how much of that is due to adverts being derivative of Guy Ritchie or vice versa I'm not so sure. Ritchie's dialog is much better than his previous film but his plot, I'm afraid to say is vastly inferior and feels a little hurried at times, the plot itself is not overly complex but Ritchie's direction serves to make it more so. His occasional use of flashbacks to different characters do not work too well either. Guy Ritchie is an accomplished and talented writer and while his Direction is stylish it still needs a lot of work. All things said Snatch is by no means the worst film of the year and is well worth going to see, just don;t go in with your expectations too high. 7/10.