| Snatch | |
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English filmmaker Guy Ritchie is hip. He's had a hip debut film, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which is religiously viewed again and again by his hipster fans, and he just got married to a hip superstar. Now he's got a hip new movie, starring such hip actors as Benicio del Toro and Brat Pitt. The soundtrack is superhip, the editing is as hip as it could be, and the whole endeavor just smacks of utmost hipness.
Then why does the result feel so empty and pointless?
In many ways, Snatch is a remake of Lock, Stock. There's the same disjointed storytelling with funky music and twisted plots within plots. There's the same array of characters, ranging from tough gangsters, quirky gangsters, painfully stupid gangsters, and foul-mouthed gangsters all the way to gangsters who are dead. As in Lock, Stock, there's nary a woman in sight. There are clever nicknames, gun sales, deals gone bad, and a diamond as big as a fist. There are jump cuts, freeze frames, split frames, spinning pictures, flashbacks, and flashforwards-- like a kid in a toy store, Guy Ritchie rolls out an enormous array of directoral gimmicks.
And then there's the violence. Lots and lots of it. An abbreviated list includes heads smashed in car doors, brain splatter on white tiles, pigs eating corpses, a dragging torture, severed limbs, people smashed by baseball bats, incinerated mothers, anti-aircraft guns, the nastiest boxing match this side of Raging Bull and generally more shooting deaths than Saving Private Ryan. Whenever a scene doesn't yield itself for some physical violence, Ritchie (who also wrote the script) heaps on the verbal abuse. He's #$&@!# good at that.
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| Brad Pitt is one funny gypsy! |
None of this necessarily makes for a bad movie. All of the tricks, gimmicks, and violent deaths are aimed at making you laugh-- Snatch is a comedy, after all. Some of the jokes work, like the ones involving a squeaking dog. Brad Pitt as a boxing gypsy Piker with an indecipherable accent is a comic highlight. But after the fireworks are over, we realize that for all the evident effort, it doesn't make for a particularly good movie either.
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