We get no character backgrounds, traits, or quirks. Brick Top, Franky Four-Fingers, Bullet Tooth Tony, Boris the Blade, Turkish, Cousin Avi, etc. Trying to sort out who plays who is fairly pointless, because the cast of principals reaches into the twenties, but the headliners are Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones, Brad Pitt, Rade Serbedzija, and Jason Statham. Pitt comes off best, actually managing to elicit some sympathy as a nearly unintelligible Irish boxer. The character work is nonexistent, there's no thematic material to speak of, and the plot is ludicrously complex.
Stuff just happens, usually involving a big diamond, a rigged boxing match, and lots of guns.
His movie is loaded with style, from the freeze-frames to the slow motion to the flash cuts to the spinning cameras to the superimposed titles, everything piles on the artifice and cracks a darkly comic joke. Still, it would be nice to see a filmmaker with such obvious talent try his hand at some more substantial material. It would certainly be a more worthwhile exercise than creating heavily stylish roller coasters that, even as they manage to entertain, as Snatch does, don't seem to have much of a point. Lewd, lewd, lewd. No reviews, articles, interviews, or other information may be reprinted without the permission of the webmaster.