A redundant movie

Rating: Null/10 (23 January 2001)

If you've seen ``Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels", you have absolutely no reason to see ``Snatch"; ``Lock Stock ..." did everything that ``Snatch" does, but did it better.
The premise and structure are basically the same: in ``Lock Stock ..." the protagonists lost a lot of money at cards; here, there's a diamond at stake. In ``Lock Stock ..." there were a lot of thug Scotsmen with impenetrable accents; here, there are a lot of thug Scotsmen with impenetrable accents, plus Brad Pitt's gypsy character with an even less penetrable accent. In ``Lock Stock ..." there was Hatchet Harry, a big, scary, violent man who held the gamblers' lives in his hands; in this movie there's an unlicensed-boxing bookie who tries to be as scary, but doesn't pull it off nearly as well as Hatchet Harry did. And without revealing anything, the climaxes are exactly the same in both movies.
Only ``Snatch" is less well done than ``Lock Stock ...". There was something nicely unreal about ``Lock Stock ..." -- the camera tricks like slowing down and speeding up time, the vaguely sepia-toned film stock, and so on -- but you just felt you were watching reality through a lens. Clearly Guy Ritchie is trying to bring unreality to ``Snatch", but it comes off as more comical than ``Lock Stock ...". Not ``comical" in the sense of funny -- ``comical" in the sense that you feel you're reading a comic book rather than watching a movie. In the same vein, ``Snatch"'s pacing is too MTV: too jarring, not enjoyable. This movie is very hard to digest.
And if you've seen ``Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", you can save the $8 and stay home without missing anything.