"Do you want to go to the toilet?"

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2000)

*Possible spoilers*

The first genuine laughs appear twenty minutes into the film with some witty stuff about a getaway driver who is too big for his car. That's your lot though, with just a few uncomfortable titters from an ominously subdued audience there-after, the humour coming across like the cynical laughter of a hand bag snatcher who has robbed a pensioner. Several adjectives spring to mind while watching this dispiriting drivel: brutal, cruel, empty, repellent, trite, repetitive. Because of this there is nothing to entertain you or to find the slightest bit enjoyable.
In the Snatch universe, mankind is base and indistinguishable from the animals in the picture. A dog chasing a hare is juxtaposed with a man being deliberately set upon by Rotweillers. Black people are portrayed as stupid and every other ethnic group as venal at best. Life is about individualism and greed. You are in debt to people and the worst that can happen to you is ending up as broke as you started in a zero sum game or cut to pieces and fed to pigs, literally 'returned to the earth from whence you came'. The world as abattoir. This makes the film an avowedly satanic tract, and the fact that this is seen as synonymous with commerciality makes it a long, depressing non-sequitur. I don't think it IS commercial, but there you have it. Who is the audience for this film? Despite this being a non-secular age supposedly disinterested in politics, Britain has always been a Christian country and I suspect some people will feel assaulted by this film without quite being able to put their finger on knowing why. It will be interesting to see how it does at the box office. It is horrific and affected me surprisingly deeply.
The scene with the police and an excuse involving a dog is actually taken from a real life incident with a gangster employee of the Kray twins. Likewise, this film is designed to be like one long pub anecdote, and it's no accident that this format was chosen as it puts the characters at a distant, as mere cyphers, so that it can concentrate exclusively on what it is truly turned on by: violence. It is a film in the service of evil rather than as an ironic counterpart to it.
"I've seen some performers in my time, but he enjoys his work. And that's not the half of it."