Recorded history tells us that Guy Ritchie, formerly the Great White Hope of British cinema, fell in with the box office poison known as Madonna and lost his way.
We’re not so sure.
Swept Away, the catastrophic ‘love and rape’ adventure fashioned around Mrs. Ritchie, is, admittedly, pretty dreadful. But watch the making-of doc and you’ll find excitable young marrieds nursing an in-joke they haven’t quite managed to convey to people who aren’t them.
We are even prepared to tentatively raise one finger on one hand for Revolver. An ill-advised metaphysical gangster flick punctuated by nonsense from the Kabbalah and numerology, it deserved its many critical brickbats, but was not short of big ideas, however pretentious and rambling.
You can’t help but feel for the Guy. If he wasn’t Mr. Madonna, might his unsuccessful experiments have their eccentric champions? Would critics see noble failure where they previously saw only a punchline? Surely he’d get the thumbs up for not being afraid to try new things?
Well, reader, the days of trying new things are over. With RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie has retreated back into the geezer movieverse where he first made his name. This is A Back to Best, Return to Form sort of film.
Like the underrated Snatch or Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Rocknrolla is, at heart, a Mexican stand-off with many, many participants. Gerard Butler is One Two, a smalltime gangster and our main man. As the film opens, a double cross leaves him indebted to Lenny Cole (the excellent Tom Wilkinson), an old school London crime lord with fond memories of the Krays. Lenny, in turn, is hoping to get one over on Uri, a sleek Russian mobster with his very own football team and everything but the ‘Hi, I’m Roman Abramovich’ name tag. Uri, being a sleazy foreigner, is hoping to bed his foxy but crooked accountant (Thandie Newton) who, because it’s just that sort of film, is secretly sleeping with One Two. And round and round we go.
The moral of the story, as far as we can tell, is why make art movies when you can make meta-movies? In that spirit the action unfolds as a pleasing series of double crosses and games. There is a significant painting we never see. There are red herrings and elaborate subplots. The cast play along with comic book largess, none more so than Toby Kebbell, whose drug-addled Russell Brand ersatz is the headlining RocknRolla of the title. He deserves no less.