RocknRolla: Guy Ritchie's Not-a-Comeback

The Guy Ritchie story is pretty familiar by now: he bursts onto the scene with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a thoroughly enjoyable Tarantino ripoff, follows up with Snatch (basically the same movie, with Brad Pitt), marries Madonna, his movie career falls off the deep end, and then the marriage falls apart. The great hope among his fans was that getting kicked to the curb would finally bring him back to the promise he showed with his first two movies. But his latest, RocknRolla, is just another disappointment, the exact same plot template as Lock Stock and Snatch, with more incoherent subplots, worse writing, and a nearly interminable 2-hour runtime.

The plot is so complicated that much of it is explained in a long series of voiceovers. His good guys are trying to make money off land, but they run into trouble with the local power broker, who manages to rig a deal to force them into his debt. He then enters into a deal with a Russian billionaire, who is being played by his own accountant. For some reason, there's a lucky painting, which the billionaire gives the broker, and it's immediately stolen by the broker's son, the titular junkie rock singer. The rest of the movie follows each character chasing the money and the painting.

Well, it's not all bad. As usual, Ritchie assembles a good cast to counterbalance his usual problem of having too many characters. Tom Wilkinson is a lot of fun as the familiar scene-chewing geezer crimelord of London, a much less subtle villain than he played in Batman Begins, and he is clearly enjoying himself. The rest of the stars, Mark Strong, Idris Elba, Thandie Newton, Gerard Butler, don't embarrass themselves or choke on the overwritten dialogue, but neither do they rise above it.

Still, the dialogue's the problem. Ritchie seems only to have one story to tell -- disparate groups of London gangsters chasing a Macguffin -- and only one way to tell it, with choppy editing, overuse of voiceovers, recycled character types, and tough-guy writing that makes every line verge into a monologue. However, the biggest problem isn't that we've seen it all before. The last time he went to the same well, Snatch, it worked. It's that he keeps on trying to do more with the same formula, and he's simply hit a wall. His dialogue is longer, more forced and less funny. He has to rely on more voiceovers because he tries to shoehorn more subplots into the same running time. Like M. Night Shyamalan (or Paul Thomas Anderson), he has turned into a director who should no longer be allowed to write his own scripts.

I haven't lost all faith in Ritchie -- "Lock Stock" is still one of my favorite movies, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt as long as I can. His next movie is Sherlock Holmes, which (hopefully) will force him out of his comfort zone enough to rediscover the sure touch he had his first time out. But I'm not optimistic.

Comments

[clashcitysupermarket]

Don't want to be a sexist, so I should add that there are many examples of famous women with famously bad taste also : Halle Berry and Eric Benet, Liz Hurley and the philandering Hugh Grant, Daynara Torres and the talentless Marc Anthony, the lovely Tea Leoni and both sex-addicted David Duchovny and (ugh) BIlly Bob Thornton (who wasn't great to Laura Dern either).

[Alex Remington - Huffpost Blogger]

Dave Justice wasn't good to Halle either. Fame certainly doesn't make for good relationships. There are so few that actually have seemed to work: Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It's worst of all when the significant other starts interfering with the artist's creative output, though: Katie Holmes was doing some interesting work before Tom Cruise messed up her head. I certainly don't begrudge anyone the search for love. I'm just sorry these people had to take the long road.

[clashcitysupermarket]

After Madonna, Ritchie was unfortunately just Daffy Ducked. You wonder about all these talented men, with the world at their feet -- Lennon, Beckham, Cobain -- what were they thinking??

[DCDan]

Watch Layer Cake. Then watch RocknRolla.

And then watch the original RocknRolla -- Layer Cake -- again.

Shameless.

[Alex Remington - Huffpost Blogger]

Layer Cake, the debut film by Matthew Vaughn, who produced Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, is really, really good. And, though it has a similar cast of characters -- British gangsters getting in money troubles over drugs -- it's such a different tone than Guy Ritchie's movies. But it's really a fantastic movie. And I'm a huge fan of Vaughn, whose second film is Stardust, a Neil Gaiman adaptation that's simply delightful, sort of a completely straightfaced Princess Bride-like fantasy movie.

I'm beginning to think that Vaughn's a much better filmmaker than Ritchie. But we'll have to see what Vaughn does with his third movie, and what Ritchie does with Sherlock Holmes.

[hip dibler]

would ritchie even have a carerr if he didn't have tarantino to steal from?

[Alex Remington - Huffpost Blogger]

In principle, there's nothing wrong with stealing; Tarantino certainly wouldn't exist without the work of a lot of other directors. The problem is when the results suck. Ritchie's first two movies were a lot of fun, and Lock Stock is legitimately terrific. But Rocknrolla is just terrible, and suggests that he really doesn't have anything more to say, even if he thinks he does.

[Antdevamp]

I saw it on Saturday night, same day as 'Quantum of Solace', and it blew the former out of the water. We don't sit around crying that Scorsese is addicted to crime dramas, I don't see why we should suddenly be down on Ritchie just because you think you know something about him because he dated your pop idol.

Nothing about RocknRolla was simple-it had as many kabbalistic truths hidden in it as Revolver, while still remaining a fantastic crime film with Jeremy Piven thrown in for spice! I am pretty sure it is impossible to disagree with you more. RocknRolla kicked ass like Trainspotting on crystal meth.