Rocknrolla

The Age

Friday October 31, 2008

Jim Schembri

RocknRolla

(114 min) MA 2/5

A full decade since the advent of his much-loved cartoony crime comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels it is perhaps time for us to just come out and finally admit to the world that Guy Ritchie is not a very good director.

In his latest over-stylised attempt to replicate the pulpy joie de vivre of Lock, Stock, Ritchie sets RocknRolla in a patently mud-filtered London criminal underworld populated by his usual array of oversized villains speaking in exaggerated accents about crooked real-estate deals, double-dealing Russian mobsters and whether a bloke having one-off sex with another bloke makes him a "poof".

Gerard Butler (300, Nim's Island) heads this scattershot mess as a wannabe businessman who falls into debt with crime lord Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson). Mixed into the haywire plot is an emaciated rock star in hiding (Jamie Campbell Bower) who is believed to be dead, and a sexy accountant played by Thandie Newton, whose starched performance suggests she might be one of the living dead.

As the tough-talking, swear-happy, accent-crazy ensemble shoot, shout and punch their way through a scrambled, largely incomprehensible story the central irritation with Ritchie's films becomes increasingly pronounced.

Since his fluke hit with Lock, Stock, Ritchie's taste for sacrificing old-fashioned narrative drive and clarity for what he believes are entertaining quirks has simply become tiresome. Thus, RocknRolla is littered with pointless digressions, tedious tricks (subtitles in a loud party! Brilliant!) and story detours that lead nowhere and that barely raise a laugh.

RocknRolla is meant to be a throwaway crime-comedy, and has a few moments of fun (mostly involving the trail of a missing painting), but essentially comes across as an exercise in hollow stylistic posturing trying to paper over a spine-less story.

It also feels like a desperate attempt by Ritchie to "return to form" after the catastrophe of his 2002 Madonna clunker Swept Away (note: never make a film starring your wife) and the justly derided, unreleased, all-but-unwatchable Kabbalah-inspired 2005 gangster film Revolver (note: never make a film starring your wife's religion).

All Ritchie succeeds in doing in RocknRolla is remind us what a glorious fluke Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was and that, however hard you try, cinematic lightning is something you just can't bottle. -- JIM SCHEMBRI

General release