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UK 2005
Directed by
Guy Ritchie
115 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

Revolver

Guy Ritchie wowed us all in 1998 with his debut feature Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and followed it with the equally good Snatch in 2000. Then came the Madonna years and he crashed and burned, not recovering until 2009 with Sherlock Holmes albeit not then or since regaining anything like the fire power of his two opening salvos. 

Revolver comes slap bang in the middle of this slump (Ritchie and Madonna married in 2000 and divorced in 2008) as the director attempts to give his signature style – a rogues’ gallery of villainous characters, convoluted plotting,  East End of London patois, jump-cut editing, intermittent sur-titles and so on – a new lease of life with tidbits of metaphysical musings. What is supposed to be beneath all the self-congratulatory flashiness, of a very much standard issue revenge thriller is opaque at best, incomprehensible at worst.

Jason Statham (who had starred in Snatch) plays Jake Green who has just been released after seven years in jail spent in solitary between a con man in the cell on one side and a chess master on the other. He wants payback from his old enemy, Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta), who was responsible for his incarceration. In bat of n eyelid he  wins a fortune at Macha’s casino who in turn puts out a contract on him. As he leaves the casino he collapses and so discovers that he has a rare and soon-to-be fatal blood disease. Then two mysterious strangers Zach and Avi (Vincent Pastore and Andre Benjamin) turn up and offer him protection provided he gives them all his money and does exactly what they tell him. 

Are Zach and Avi the crims who were in jail with Jake?  Are they guardian angels? What has the persistent motif of chess got to do with the story? Who is Sam Gold? And so on and so on. It’s probably best not to ask such questions as there probably aren’t any answers. Apparently Ritchie spent three years on the script on which Luc Besson also worked but they seem to have lost any self-critical capabilities and when you cut out the existential maunderings and get down to the nitty-gritty the remainder is close to negligible.

What is even worse, Ritchie tacks a swag of academic talking heads banging on about the traps of the ego over the closing credits as if this somehow salvaged the failure to make his point within the narrative itself. Ironically, it only makes matters worse.

FYI: If you want to see the sort of thing Ritchie was probably trying to do see Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful Ghost Dog which was released the same year.

 

 

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