RocknRolla (2008)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
When a Russian mobster sets up a real estate scam that generates millions of pounds, various members of London's criminal underworld pursue their share of the fortune. Various shady characters, including Mr One-Two, Stella the accountant, and Johnny Quid, a druggie rock-star, try to claim their slice.
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22 films that influenced RocknRolla
What critics say influenced RocknRolla
Avoid RocknRolla, keep the Lock, Stock DVD in the cupboard and acquire by any means possible the superior British gangster film The Long Good Friday.
ALMOST all London crime films since 1980 owe a debt to John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday but some owe more than others.
If “The Long Good Friday” (1980) were an Abbott and Costello movie, it would have looked and sounded a lot like this.
Driven by cockney bovver boy riffs culled from The Long Good Friday, Minder and The Sweeney, and a visual style remarkable for its relentless spray of music video techniques minus a strong personality and point of view, Ritchie's movies (the over-rated Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch) are fun but dumb.
There's an old-school bad guy named Lenny ( Tom Wilkinson , channeling Bob Hoskins in "The Long Good Friday") and a new-school Russian bad guy named Uri (Karel Roden, revisiting the shady Russki he played in "The Bourne Supremacy" ).
“Wanda,” for instance, Barbara Loden’s impressive début behind the camera, came out in 1970, in a lull between two films directed by her husband, Elia Kazan.
Madonna is, of course, an actress of wide repute; the nights on which I saw “Shanghai Surprise” and “Body of Evidence” could not be more memorable if they had been seared onto my flanks with a branding iron.
Like Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” this revolved around the loggerheads of two people stuck on a lonely island, although there, it must be said, the resemblance ends.
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Madonna is, of course, an actress of wide repute; the nights on which I saw “Shanghai Surprise” and “Body of Evidence” could not be more memorable if they had been seared onto my flanks with a branding iron.
He needs 8-way-crosses and inside jokes and gangstas who watch The Remains of The Day on DVD while waiting for the drop and Thandie Newton dancing with Gerard Butler in a scene that rivals the one where Uma and JT do it in Pulp Fiction.
Stella's romance with One Two is suitably fun and playful as she coerces him to steal money from her boss, and Butler and Newton get some of the movie's best scenes, one in which they're dancing at a party that's almost the antithesis of the Travolta-Thurman dance sequence in "Pulp Fiction" and then later in the movie, there's a one-of-a-kind sex scene.
And, believe it or not, the whole film actually revolves around a lucky painting (that we never see, a la the briefcase in Pulp Fiction) that Uri loans to Lenny and is then stolen by the mobster's rock-and-roller (say that fast and with a British accent and you'll get the title) son Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell).
It's definitely rowdy enough to draw a young male audience, but it's also wincingly dated, playing like a Cockney remake of "Pulp Fiction," with no new ideas and so cartoonish in style that it's difficult to emotionally connect with anything that's going on.
The sight of Gerard Butler and Thandie Newton doing a diffidently narcoleptic shimmy together is just a zombified version of what John Travolta and Uma Thurman were up to in "Pulp Fiction."
Ritchie dawdles that first hour setting the table for his heroes, "The Wild Bunch" (Gerard Butler and Idris Elba), putting them in jeopardy, but not really.
Then there's the small-time outfit known as "The Wild Bunch" (hey, I saw that movie!): between smash-and-grab robberies, partners One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (the great Idris Elba) hang out at the local pub with the other druggies, tramps and thieves, including "Handsome Bob" (Tom Hardy).
For his fifth feature film, Guy Ritchie happily ignores his previous twomisfires ( Swept Away and Revolver ) and goes back to what he does best,making dime-store, knockoff pulp thrillers.
With Rocknrolla, his incoherent, inhuman follow-up to the Kabballah-influenced Revolver , he continues to twist and writhe, attempting to replicate the success of his violent and ultra-hip freshman and sophomore efforts.
Wrong-footed by the new credit-crunch zeitgeist, but with recovered fluency after the hiccups of Revolver and Swept Away, director Guy Ritchie's latest returns to the caper comedy antics of unreconstructed London criminals familiar from his earlier Lock, Stock... and Snatch.
"RocknRolla" is a recovery from the knockout blows of his past two films — a disastrous remake of "Swept Away," starring his soon-to-be-ex-wife Madonna, and the inscrutable fantasy crime fiasco "Revolver" — but Ritchie is certainly retreading familiar thematic territory.
Technically speaking, I think that RocknRolla - which hits DVD on January 27 - is his best film to date, but then again almost anything is better than Snatch or Swept Away.
For his fifth feature film, Guy Ritchie happily ignores his previous twomisfires ( Swept Away and Revolver ) and goes back to what he does best,making dime-store, knockoff pulp thrillers.
Then again, the one time he did try something different, the result was "Swept Away," so maybe he's wise to stay in his comfort zone.
At least we’re guaranteed he’ll keep making fun shoot-em-in-the-mouth movies instead of another Swept Away.
Wrong-footed by the new credit-crunch zeitgeist, but with recovered fluency after the hiccups of Revolver and Swept Away, director Guy Ritchie's latest returns to the caper comedy antics of unreconstructed London criminals familiar from his earlier Lock, Stock... and Snatch.
While his last effort, RocknRolla, resulted in a shot at bringing a beloved fictional character back to revisionist light (his take on Sherlock Holmes is mere weeks away), one can’t help but feel that too much was made out this initial effort, a clever if cluttered walk down old school English gangster gratuity.
Ritchie has returned to the world of snarky crime capers that he captured effectively beginning a decade ago with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and continuing with Snatch.
Guy Ritchie made his mark for film-goers not by marrying one of the world's most visible pop stars, but by crafting Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch .
While no one will mistake it for anything remotely original - especially in light of his two international hits Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - Rocknrolla represents a true return to form.
Ritchieâs latest is a sequel in spirit to his earlier London-gangster comedies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, which might just be a nice way of saying that heâs now made the same movie three times.
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It’s official: the Ridley Scott who created such signature visions as Blade Runner and Alien is dead and has been replaced by a pod person that churns out slick-looking, but wholly generic big-budget time-wasters like American Gangster and A Good Year.
It’s official: the Ridley Scott who created such signature visions as Blade Runner and Alien is dead and has been replaced by a pod person that churns out slick-looking, but wholly generic big-budget time-wasters like American Gangster and A Good Year.
It’s official: the Ridley Scott who created such signature visions as Blade Runner and Alien is dead and has been replaced by a pod person that churns out slick-looking, but wholly generic big-budget time-wasters like American Gangster and A Good Year.
This is the most preposterous plot kink since ultra-evil Mason Verger schemed to feed Hannibal Lecter to a pen full of giant killer hogs in "Hannibal."
(Case in point: “The Big Sleep,” starring Bogart and Bacall.)