RocknRolla
15, Nationwide
Guy Ritchie’s career has been in the doldrums recently. Having tried to remake Swept Away, then following it up with a Kabbalah-inspired remake of The Prisoner, he’s finally seen the error of his ways. He has now remade Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the result, while hardly a classic, is a big improvement on Revolver. Not that I’ve actually seen Revolver, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, a website that keeps track of these things, it was one of the worst reviewed films of the year. RocknRolla is merely mediocre.
Comparing RocknRolla with Lock, Stock, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong for Guy Ritchie. Is it that his comic vision of the London underworld now seems a bit hackneyed, or simply that Ritchie himself has become a bit of a hack? Both, I suspect.
Watching Lock, Stock when it first came out, I was pleasantly surprised. Ritchie had succeeded in resurrecting a moribund genre — the British gangster picture — by injecting it with some much-needed black humour. Instead of trying to update The Long Good Friday, which was the mistake most of his competitors made, he seemed more indebted to the great Ealing Comedies. Yet this was The Lavender Hill Mob via Mean Streets — a portrait of London that owed as much to Martin Scorsese as it did to Charles Crichton. Robert McKee, the legendary Hollywood screenwriting guru, was so taken with this strange cocktail that he credited Ritchie with having invented a new genre: black farce.
The thing that made Lock, Stock such an impressive debut was the sheer confidence of its 29-year-old director. Ritchie seemed to possess the same swagger — the same cocksure arrogance — as his cast of young villains.
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