Guy Ritchie Snatches Another Winner

By Jason Zingale
FOR THE POST

Guy Ritchie is back with more of the same fast-paced, idiosyncratic directing in his sophomore attempt, Snatch.

Fresh from his marriage to Madonna, Ritchie has released his most recent caper movie that incorporates plenty of freeze frames and slo-mo filming. The film centers on a slew of main characters that he spins around in a labyrinth-like plot that, by pure chance, saves the movie's hero.

The film begins with the theft of a flawless 86-carat diamond by Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro), a Jewish gambling junkie, from a group of unsuspecting Antwerp gem merchants. American mobster Cousin Avi (Dennis Farina) is promised the big stone, and his London-based cousin Doug the Head (Mike Reid) is promised some of the smaller ones. Doug the Head, knowing that Franky has a nasty gambling habit, hires Boris the Blade (Rade Serbedzija), a Russian spy-turned-gangster renowned for dodging bullets, to get together a group of thieves to steal the diamond when Franky is reeled into betting on an illegal boxing match.

On the other side of the story is boxing promoter Turkish (Jason Statham, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), who is having all sorts of problems. Turkish and his buddy Tommy (Stephen Graham) are currently involved in setting up a fight between their own man and the in-house boxer of Brick Top (Alan Ford). Brick Top is the underworld's top crime lord who has a penchant for killing anyone who displeases him and feeding the corpses to the pigs on his livestock farm.

Turkish's guy is knocked out during a rehearsal bout with a gibbering Irish gypsy. "One Punch" Mickey O'Neil (Brad Pitt) is rashly recruited as the replacement. The deal for the big unlicensed fight is that Mickey is supposed to take a dive in the fourth round. One problem: Mickey isn't too sharp about following instructions as to when to take the dive.

Meanwhile, Boris hires three misfit thugs — Sol, Vinny and Tyrone (Lennie James, Robbie Gee, and Ade), who steal, lose, find and re-lose the diamond. They are joined by a runaway gypsy dog that steals the show from almost all of the actors, except Pitt, who physically performs brilliantly as the piker who no one can understand. Avi becomes upset with the progress of his heist and hires Bullet Tooth Tony (British soccer player Vinnie Jones, Lock, Stock) to find the loot.

Snatch is a film with as many subplots as there are characters, but as each character is eliminated, the subplots come closer together, and in true Ritchie style the movie doesn't end until the words "The End" are stamped across the screen.

As with Lock, Stock, part of the winning black humor of Ritchie's vision is that most of the slaughter takes place just to the left of the cameras. Even when he dwells on the blood lust of his characters, Ritchie does not actually show the bodies being hacked apart or riddled with bullets.

Some critics may put down Snatch as a polished remake of Lock, Stock, but Snatch accents everything Lock, Stock had to offer. It's slicker, snappier, more confident and better acted. And though he does inhabit the same filthy underworld as Quentin Tarantino, what Ritchie may lack in originality, he makes up for with boldness and manic energy.

And thank goodness Ritchie doesn't think he's an actor. Right from the opening credits, which introduce each of the film's characters via stylish freeze-frames; Snatch makes it clear it's not meant to be analyzed too closely.