This Snatch is slippery

Rating: 7/10 (16 July 2001)

Guy Ritchie, the Man Who's Married To Madonna, directed this movie about missing jewels in London's boxing underground. Played out in the Goodfellas vein, there are characters with colorful personalities to match their colorful names, including Franky Four Fingers, Bullet Tooth Tony, One Punch Mickey O'Neil, Boris the Blade, Turkish, and Brick Top. Stylish and violent - but not in an off-putting way, if you're a fan of the genre, Snatch is all about ice, doublecrossings, fights, guns, blood, guts, ah, the fun never ends. Brad Pitt plays a pugilistic gypsy (he's "One Punch") who delivers a wonderful engaging performance, speaking his lines in an almost unintelligible dialect. You see, everyone in the film (except for Dennis Farina, who plays Cousin Avi from the U.S.) is British. If you've never heard any Briton speak other than the high-class West End junk that the Queen uses, you'll be in for quite of a shock here. But once your ear gets tuned in to the accents, you'll be fine. (Of course, Pitt's Mickey was given that garbled tongue as kind of a way for the writer to poke fun at Britain's own dialects, which are understandably tough for non-Britons to decipher.) There are fixed fights, botched robberies, a dog who may have eaten a diamond, carnivorous pigs, and a getaway driver who has trouble getting away. You remember when Quentin Tarantino reintroduced the caper-gone-bad genre with movies like Pulp Fiction and reservoir Dogs? This one carries the torch a little bit further, and it's carried by a solid ensemble cast that includes Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro (Frankie Four Fingers), Farina, and Pitt. The rest of the gang you might not recognize, but they're also not characters that simply dissolve into a scene, either. You know the kind - in a subpar gangster movie, all of the hitmen look alike. Not here. This is a cool, fun action film with panache and a touch of humor in the right places (sick humor, though).