Bullet Tooth Poffy
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"Snatch"
will grab.
by
Jon Dunmore © 5 Sep 2006.
Released
on the heels of his stylishly dangerous Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,
Snatch simultaneously solidified the grit-edged, flamethrower directorial
style of Guy Ritchie, even as it launched Jason Statham into his Transporter
leading man roles; heralded an altogether explosive performance from Alan Ford
as Brick Top; proved yet again the go-to value of Rade Sherbedgia as generic Slovakian
Hard Guy (even though no two publications can agree on the spelling of his name);
saw Dennis Farina reprising his smarm-jockey from Get Shorty; was a hilarious
continuation of Vinnie Jones' unbalanced contract killer from Lock, Stock,
and marked Bradley Pitt's first foray into incoherent mumbling whilst covered
in poo. With
a soundtrack as impertinent as its plot and as foreboding as the felons who populate
it, edited with a verve which could snap your cervical vertebrae and shot with
a style that will make your eyebrows bleed, Snatch is a Molotov cocktail
of a movie; a careening, chain-wielding maniac of a film. It's
about incompetent thugs and incomprehensible gypsies. It's about Desert Eagle
point five-oh's and fist-sized, dog-swallowed diamonds. It's about bare-knuckle
street fighting, for gangsters who breed people-eating pigs. No good guys and
no bad guys - only bad guys and badder guys. Indescribable
at best, inexplicable at worst, who knows exactly what is going on in Snatch,
except maybe Guy Ritchie - and only when he's drunk.
Compulsive gambler,
Frankie Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro) must deliver from London to New York an
86-carat diamond to Cousin Avi (Farina), but Boris the Blade (Sherbedgia) gets
in the way, via his small-time help, Vincent and Sol, simultaneously igniting
the wrath of sadistic underworld kingpin, Brick Top (who would just as readily
suffocate you with a plastic bag or feed you to a pig as deign to scathe your
manhood with his cockney insults). So Cousin Avi must jump-cut travel to England
and employ Bullet Tooth Tony (Jones) to retrieve the gem.
Disparate plots
and subplots intertwine like choker vines - with comedy so sharp you could paper-cut
your tongue on it, in dialog so lushly British you could smell the fish 'n' chips
frying in three-day-old oil.
In a seemingly removed throughline, Turkish (Statham) and his marginally-tolerated
sidekick, Tommy (Stephen Graham) get themselves deep into devil dealings over
bare-knuckle boxing matches with Brick Top and must tactfully employ the very
fighter who put their star fighter out of commission - the "harder than a
coffin nail" gypsy, Mickey (Pitt). Refusing to play the game of taking dives,
Mickey gets Turkish and Tommy into even deeper devilry when his freight-train
right hook fells Brick Top's bet-winning boxer.
Freeze frames, crash-cuts, slomo, chronological reversal, whip zooms, strobed
film, contrast-treated frames, screen wipes, follow-frames, Batman angles - Ritchie
relishes throwing the baby and the bathwater at the viewer, garnering his fair
share of stylistic detractors. Ultimately, Snatch is not designed for The
Wedding Planner set.
In the final few minutes, the disparate threads
coalesce and the diamonds and dogs and boxers and blaggings all somehow crazily
make sense.
But only when you're drunk.
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