Howdy Doghousers, I took myself for a little walkies to the local flea pit the other day to catch Guy Ritchie's latest offering; RocknRolla. I firstly have to say I was quite excited when I saw this movie trailed; I like Ritchie's films, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was brilliant. A British, slick, low budget knees-up gangster laugh. Then he followed it with Snatch - Lock Stock with money, but that's okay. Look at The Evil Dead and The Evil Dead II, that's all Sam Raimi did. All good.But it seems something somewhere has gone terribly wrong. 10 years later and he's still trying to make that gangster film. Not that time should be a scapegoat, Martin Scorsese had a 12 year gap between Goodfellas and Gangs of New York. Gangs of New York, although a gangster film isn't really a copy of Goodfellas, more of a bad ass period drama. Bad example.
So what's Ritchie doing? I watched Revolver and thought it was interesting, twisted and difficult to follow but different. So to give it a chance I made a cup of rosey and watched it again. To see if I could figure the complex plot and coax out the hidden story/message. What a waste of an afternoon that was. Looked nice though. Might as well watch MTV for 2 hours. Probably make more sense.
Back to RocknRolla: It's boring, over long, same old same old, and it feels that if you were to mix all of his films together, even the Madonna one, this is what you get. A watered down, confused cocktail of his former talent. Also, bad plot aside; why is every scene in a car shot in a studio? As good as your matte work is, it still shows. And why are the London streets so very deserted? Even in the middle of the night there are still some cars around. Plus - and this is just one of my personal hates - why do we not really see the only car crash in the film? And I'm sick of that car-coming-but-only-the-audience-can-see-it-interior-shot. It has been done so many times, even Cold Feet were dong it back in the 90's. That reminds me - that car explosion - what the fuck was that? I've seen better CGI on my PS2. If your film costs $18,000,000, surely you can blow up a car or two?
Minor production points aside is it any good?
No. RocknRolla is a convoluted, over tired, over long, expositional, mockney bullshit of a movie and Warner bros. should stop giving him money. All of the characters are 2 dimensional and I had no empathy for any of them, - even the Jonny Quid character played by the excellent Toby Kebbell who was supposed to be the 'RocknRolla'. He was probably written as a lovable rogue who says and does all the stuff that we mere mortals only dream of. And he was hateful. When he did get shot it wasn't soon enough. I later read that he was based on Pete Doherty. Well done for picking such a charismatic icon to base a character on, perhaps Madge only allows Heat Magazine and the Metro in the house.
Although Empire gave it 4 stars they said in their review; 'Storytelling isn't Ritchie's forte'. WTF? He's the director and screen writer. Storytelling should be his forte. Let's let him off shall we? He's posh.
The bad news is , RocknRolla is apparently the first in a trilogy. Balls. An excuse for all the loose ends? That's the lamest excuse I've ever heard, and I'm just looking at my DVD collection to see if any other trilogy part one's have such loosely tied endings....
Godfather, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Indy, Bourn, Matrix. Not having much luck here. Ritchie had better pull something pretty special out of his tweed sleeve to make the next one a good watch. It was all a dream or something?
I just hope I'm wrong. Ritchie used to be a burning light in the bad rom-com that is British cinema. At least we've still got Edgar Wright.
Whimper.
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