cocky

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2008)

Snatch was perceived by me and my buddies at the time as unapologetically male entertainment. We were all on board with a movie like this that was a template for male behavior we might snag. There's barely even a minor female role in it. As male attributes are largely performed, maybe the movie would show us how it's done. We wouldn't have admitted that at the time, but I'm more comfortable with that now.
Guy Ritchie knows how to make a first movie that gets attention (and thus gets made), but one would have hoped he had better, more developed ideas about the 2nd; than to just duplicate the 1st movie; than troweling on style as anxiously and nervously as he does here, to disguise the fact that nothing's really going on. This movie's complexity doesn't reveal any more on ensuing viewings than it did on the 1st. It's complex for the sake of being complex. It's not really a film... it's just entertainment. Ritchie is obviously fond of these hoodlums in all their variety, and he makes us fond of them too; the self-assured, masculine Turkish, the vulnerable good guy Tommy. I loved watching Turkish and Tommy but their scenes don't add up to more than the sum of their parts, and that's the big problem with both of the movies (this and L.S. & B.) They're just a string of poorly-related conceits or 'features.'
Pitt is fine here as an unintelligible thug. And Ritchie HAS come up with a pretty loathsome villain, not the easiest thing to do; a low-class, mean S.O.B. in an enormous pair of glasses. He can mark that down as an achievement. The movie is a strong reminder that there really are people you do not want to meet in this life, despite Hollywoods tendency to paint villains in generalities and broad strokes.
The authors of Lucky Number Slevin (which you should see) obviously like this movie.