“Dang! This always happens when we bring civilization to a Third World country!”

When Wrongs Make Right.

What makes DC’s THE SUICIDE SQUAD of 2021, different from their 2016 movie of the almost same name, SUICIDE SQUAD? Well, many more things than just THE – R-rated, deeper characterization, rapscallion director, premium swearing, delicious gore, and moral ambiguity right up the chocolate starfish. Written and directed by James Gunn, it’s better in many ways – and the same in the worst ways. It’s a soft reboot / wink-wink sequel / lazy Hollywood cashing in on a recognizable property, that finds another convict team of superhero-adjacent misfits blackmailed into service to the American government, sent to the fictional dictatorship of Corto Maltese to eliminate a threat to democracy. Let the double-crosses and high crimes and malfeasance begin, mostly perpetrated by the BIGGEST threat to democracy – the American government. Hey there Movie Maniacs, welcome to THE SUICIDE SQUAD Top 5 Bottom 5.

Let’s start with the Bottom 5 things about THE SUICIDE SQUAD, starting with number 5 and working our way up to the worst.

Michael Rooker opens the film, with long blond hair, looking sexy as hell – and immediately I thought: Are there no more actors? Rooker was already a prominent character in one of James Gunn’s other tentpoles, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. That was a Marvel property. And now, instead of letting another talented struggling actor make rent, Rooker crosses cinematic universes to appear in this >DC< film? Really, are there no more actors?

Josh Brolin was Thanos – then he was Cable in the same Marvel universe! What the fuck? And Sylvester Stallone has ENOUGH franchises – ROCKY, RAMBO, EXPENDABLES, ESCAPE PLAN – can they not give his role as the voice of King Shark to someone else? And his voice is so treated, Stallone is not even vocally recognizable, nor is he doing the mocap for the CGI creature he’s voicing – that’s Steve Agee, who also plays a staff member. It’s like wasting the salary on Vin Diesel to say “I am Groot” from the comfort of his dickcheese bathrobe. Of course, it’s their agents who have the casting company connectrions to these blockbusters – that’s why the same 12 actors get all the work. And the astronomical salaries of the stars is well worth the cost of the viewers they draw. Their names are marquee Viagra.

That’s why any productions out of Hollywood are on this upward-spiraling budget and downward-spiraling creativity – they HAVE to make back the money for hiring name actors, so they HAVE to hire name actors to make back the money. Now, we can’t begrudge anyone making money, but it’s so transparently —– venal, with everything homogenized to offend the least people and maximize the viewership. This is not like Clint Eastwood using his same trusted cast in a slew of fun 80s films for low budget efficiency and reliability – these are blockbusters that could afford to hire new actors, new writers, new directors, with new ideas – no, every tentpole, you’ll see the SAME 12 actors, the SAME 12 writers, the SAME 12 directors.

To subvert expectations, major characters die unexpectedly – on the pretense that the movie is edgy, and on that conceit that all these characters are expendable D-list DC properties… yeeeeh, but the main ROLES are played by A-LIST actors – I mean, they tried to get Will Smith back – but – other contractual obligations – so there’s the obvious Will Smith replacement – Idris Elba, basically playing exactly the same character as Will Smith, down to his daughter being his motivation. So the arbitrary deaths are basically the D-list ACTORS – stop pretending like your highest paid A-lister might die – Margot Robbie, reprising her D-character Harley Quinn. And it’s gonna be hard for A-lister Idris Elba to die also, even though you’ve probably forgotten his D-character’s name by now. But Pete Davidson? Who gives a fuck? D-actor, D-character…

Like Marvel did with GUARDIANS in the hands of Gunn, DC pulls out lesser-known properties like King Shark and Polka Dot Man and Peacemaker, in an attempt to drag diehard D-character fans out of the woodwork, while throwing in those A-listers to keep it profitable, but if you want to be venal, DC, why force untapped characters into the DCEU, instead of dusting off your established properties that made more money at the worldwide box office than SUICIDE SQUAD? I’m looking at BATMAN V SUPERMAN‘s 872 mil vs SUICIDE SQUAD’s 746 mil. (Which number is bigger? I can’t tell.) Because yeh, I wanna see Henry Cavill as Superman in MAN OF STEEL 2. Get to work, Warner Bros. dickheads.

Viola Davis is government agent, Waller, overseeing the black operation. After the last movie built her into the most ruthless, vicious, callous mercenary, who gunned down her own staff because “they didn’t have clearance,” this installment totally loses its grasp of her character, when her underlings knock her out with a golf club – and suffer ZERO retribution! Waller represents a government operation so deadly, it blows people’s heads off for insubordination – and in knocking her out, her staff has mutinied against the government they are working for. And none of them lose their lives, let alone their jobs?!! A comic reaction shot of Waller holding an ice-pak and looking at her staff like kids in a sitcom who have learned the meaning of decency.

Whereas John Cena’s character is an idiot-patriot called Peacemaker, Waller is the intelligent despicable dark side of that paradoxical statement. They show her disregard for life when she blows Michael Rooker’s skull to pieces, and her reprehensible ethics when she blackmails Bloodsport into the team by threatening his daughter’s life (Oh yeh, that’s Idris Elba’s name)…  The filmmakers forget that when her character comes to, she would simply shoot every mutineer in the fucking head. Twice. Like John Wick.

Weasel – what the fuck? Even in this comicbook universe where men shoot polka dots and a galactic starfish can communicate in English, this character doesn’t make any sense. It’s a distraction, because every time it’s onscreen, all I can think of is: it can’t communicate – how does it even know to BE here? The comicbook character was a man transformed into a weasel, so he had human cognizance and language. But this thing is just a dumb animal. How did Waller communicate the concept of shortening its sentence if it performed the mission? And why is it in prison anyway? Oh, it killed 27 children. Yeh, but it’s an animal – if a lion kills 27 children, you don’t put it in HUMAN jail.

How do they make it walk in a line for the SLOMO shot? Does it understand there’s an explosive in its head? Does it even know what side it’s on? James Gunn wanted it to look like that cartoon, Bill The Cat – okaaaay, but without the barest human cognizance, you’ve created a character with no character.

The worst, stupidest, most annoying thing about THE SUICIDE SQUAD: Exposition! It’s bad enough in a regular movie, when it jumps out at you totally divorced from the scene, like when two characters meet for the first time, “Hey sis” “Hey bro” [somebody shoot me] – and then never call each other that for the rest of the movie. Now multiply that by 20 characters, unnecessary dialogue desperately trying to shape full life histories in 5 seconds screentime – with the filmmakers trying their damndest to get away with “creative” ways to slide the OBVIOUS EXPOSITION by us unnoticed, like the office staff taking bets on which squad member will die first, while explaining to each other the member’s powers, or one of the senior staff – who should know the “guy who put Superman in the ICU” asking who that guy is. Waller, the most insufferable offender, with a monotonal seen-everything attitude that gives Jack Reacher a run for his smug. Stop telling each other what you should already know. And ESPECIALLY stop telling THE CHARACTER WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW ABOUT THEMSELVES!!

And now, Movie Maniacs, the Top 5 things about THE SUICIDE SQUAD.

The Harley Quinn origin movie BIRDS OF PREY had Harley shooting up a police station with non-lethal bean bags of glitter. Even though it was an R-rated movie, it seemed like a desperate PG-13 solution to side-step the gore “creatively.” Here, James Gunn ACTUALLY purveys a creative method of representing gore – with cartoon flowers. Granted, these are dictator soldiers, so they can be murdered in good Western conscience, but this tongue-in-cheek filmmaker succeeds in distracting from the heavy gore truly creatively by seeming to take us on a journey into what Harley’s deranged mind might be perceiving, instead of the same old Black Widow thigh-jitsu action sequence.

Writer-director James Gunn has done for DC what he did for Marvel: bring D-list characters into A-list infamy – and make us care about them! He does this through his unique flair for comedic timing, his countless creative shots, gutshock action, and imaginative title cards. He’s like a more tolerable Michael Bay. Director David Ayer’s 2016 SUICIDE SQUAD (which we now know is more of a studio Frankenstein than the director’s vision) lacked the charm of this entry, which explodes with color and verve and contextual humor, and grand lessons in film MAKING. Either that, or – goddamit! – we’re getting sucked into the style of these same 12 directors…

I cannot give the filmmakers enough props for bringing the very first Justice League villain to life – STARRO THE CONQUEROR [yes, imagine echo echo echo echo…] – and making him… cool. Talk about walking a tightrope between goofy and terrifying. Starro is not – as originally written – some “space parasite intent on conquest”; his backstory here is changed to one of poignant victimhood. We learn that American astronauts encountered him in space and brought him to Earth, to weaponize him. Good ole Murrica. He laments to the Squad, “I was happy… floating… staring at the stars…” Cute. Tragic. Starro.

Daniela Melchior stars as Ratcatcher 2, the hypersomniac daughter to an original Batman villain called Ratcatcher, who is played here for a few brief poignant moments by Taiki Waititi. (Wait – isn’t Taika a director on the Marvel side of the universe? Are there no more fucken actors?!) Even though Daniela’s character is written from scratch for this movie, she brings a humanity and heart to what could’ve been the most shallow of paper-thin placeholders.

Ratcatcher 2’s arc from a reluctant casual observer to the actual savior of the day is as surprising as it is touching. Combined with the finale orchestra swell, grandiose hero shots, and the turnaround of her saving the life of the man who promised HE would get HER back alive, she goes from that girl with the ratty hair that you never noticed, to the woman you want to marry for her power and beauty! Margot Robbie may be the obvious sex appeal of the movie – but little Daniela steals the show.

If THE SUICIDE SQUAD is about villains, then surely the biggest villain of all is the united states government. Not in a simple “hey, we install dictators in other countries” kind of way – which is bad enough – but in a layered, ambiguous, insidious, anti-society, anti-human manner. (Oh you mean republiKKKan?) The film illustrates how a banana republic works by showing us the handsome dictator of Corto Maltese and his ugly policies – and by the time we realize it’s an analog for the United States with brown faces, “freedom fighters” are rebelling against the fascist government by BREAKING INTO THE PRESIDENT’S HEADQUARTERS to stop the new president from being sworn in [sideways look at January 6th].

These Suicide Squad “villains” are only considered villains because they weren’t the people who made the rules on what constitutes villainy. Because, let’s face it – the hypocrisy of a government that derides dictators and then installs dictators in other countries is equal to the irony of that same country not having laws to deal with latent dictators within its own political system (see: the never-indicted dumbo donald, after 4 years of daily high crimes and misdemeanors). And THE SUICIDE SQUAD illustrates this government villainy transparently; they’re pretty much saying, “You think these brown people are villains – you think this purple starfish is the villain – nope, THIS is the villain.

Military Unintelligence.

Peter Weir’s stirring anti-war epic, GALLIPOLI, has a heart as large as Western Australia, a sweep as wide as its blue-chiseled skies and – Mel Gibson’s naked 24-year-old bottom.

GALLIPOLI is not about Gallipoli. The botched Australian and New Zealand Armed Corp (ANZAC) landing at that Turkish beach in 1915 is merely the backdrop to Weir’s wondrous character study of friendship and loss, as a trained athlete with a planned future and a natural athlete who is a drifter are thrown into an all-consuming social calamity which happened to be World War I.

Too right, cobber!

Rather than focus on the larger political canvas of the Battle for the Dardanelles (of which Gallipoli was a strategic plot point), Weir recounts the ANZAC effort from the naïve perspective of two barely legal Australian teenagers, Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Gibson, young and smooth as a baby’s – let alone his own – bottom), showing how the larger canvas obliterates the lives of the people providing the paint.The first half of the film, shot in the sweltering blue-skied expanses of Western Australia, is a paean to Life and Opportunity – languid, heady, joyous with innocence and aspirations. Though Australia was far removed from the European theater of war, propaganda was rife amongst the populace, inculcated to believe “you’ve just gotta be in it!” On a desert journey across a dried salt flat, blond Archy, always in white, espouses his blinkered views on patriotism, while dark-haired Frank, clad in black (like the rogue Solo to Archy’s angelic Luke), holds outlaw views that contravene the politics of the day: “It’s an English war, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

Archy’s uncle (Bill Kerr) has trained him to become a leopard of the track, a potential Olympian runner. To his uncle’s sorrow, Archy abandons his years of training to join the Army Light Horse. Yet there was so much military fervor sparking the air (gossip of friends joining and being honored, newspaper reports of “Germans crucifying kittens on church doors in Belgium”) that his uncle doesn’t question his “noble” decision to let his dream die and serve his country instead.

It is chilling hearing Archy mouth the same rationalizations that George W. Bush is rehashing in his epic War Of Terror (yes, I said “of” not “on”): “If we don’t stop them there, they could end up here.” (The movie is 1981 and the slogan is from a 1915 conflict, although the concept probably existed since cavemen had to cross the first lakes to stop other cavemen stealing their sexy, hairy-backed women.)

”Are you looking at my bottom again?”

Eventually devil-may-care Frank is worn down by the jingoism he encounters at every turn – he can only take being called a “coward” for so long (and chicks dig the uniform) – and joins the infantry with three mates (Aussie soap regulars, Robert Grubb, Tim McKenzie and David Argue) on the strength of reading about the glorious Gallipoli “baptism by fire.” (I still remember this phrase from school history lessons. Gallipoli is to Australians what The Alamo is to Americans – a bungled defeat re-imagined as a metaphysical victory.)Onto Egypt for military training in the shadow of the Giza pyramids (there’s no beating location shooting!), an incongruous festive atmosphere pervading the Aussie troops regarding the distant war as a lark. Why else would so many be convinced to sign their death warrants by recruitment? Combat exercises on the dunes are taken so frivolously that not only is every soldier uproariously laughing during simulated attacks on fellow troops, Egyptian boys run alongside the trainees entreating them to buy trinkets. The camaraderie was the drawcard: taking the piss out of the Brits, tales of heroism, singing, drinking, fighting, whoring, traveling the world with your mates. Who wouldn’t sign up for this vacation?

Tracks from Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene are incorporated into the smooth-pad soundtrack, with synthesized sounds strangely reminiscent of bullets firing and ricocheting, adding to the surreal sense of detachment that all these characters are under. Even when our lads arrive at Turkey, the first few days are spent partying on the beach (with Mark Lee’s eternally-dopey smile and Mel’s eternally-smooth bottom) with shells exploding in the distant hills.

But of course, director Weir (who co-wrote the script with David Williamson) is merely building the mateship, the humanity, the naiveté only to dash it against the selfishness, the inhumanity, the stupidity of battle, thus debunking the mythic aura surrounding Australia’s supposedly glorious entry into the Allied War Effort.

Nearly one and a half hours into the movie, one of Frank’s three mates returns from a trench assault, bringing with him a frightening reality, reporting their mate “Barney is dead.” And in these last few moments of the film, the anxiety is ramped to insane levels as Frank is made a runner between trenches, with Archy prepped to go “over the top” if Frank does not deliver the crucial “hold” message on time.

While sympathetic officers like Major Barton (Bill Hunter) try to coordinate and make sense of the melee, higher-ranking officers callously use their Australian troops as cannon fodder, to sycophantically lay the groundwork for the British troop followup – and each young Australian “digger” in his trench line silently re-assesses the motivation which led him to this intractable fate.

Miscommunication was a major part of the ANZAC downfall at Gallipoli and it could be argued that miscommunication was responsible for accruing that many troops willing to get their butts shot off in the first place – purposeful miscommunication by the military, throwing slogans and agitprop at the public to entice the disenfranchised and then sacrifice them to the maw of attrition. These lies are still being perpetrated by the criminals in power.

Weir offers us such intimacy with these characters (Frank and Archy drunkenly pasting beard on Archy’s face to fake his recruitment age, joyously reuniting on the sand dunes, racing to the pyramids, crashing an officer’s ball together, etc.) that when Archy scrambles out of his trench, in the last sprint of his life, his death comes so suddenly and unnecessarily that we feel the blow as harshly as the Turkish rounds ripping into his chest in the final still frame.

”You might get shot up there, but everyone has already seen my bottom.”

Though there are multiple nameless deaths, as soldiers leave their trenches and are pounded back into them as if punched, Weir focuses pointedly on Archy’s death to drive home the loss. In the last scene, Archy is running alone, all around him having been mowed down; he has dropped his gun and is simply sprinting forward over No Man’s Land, labored breathing and pumping feet, his uncle’s pep-talk echoing in his head: “How fast can ya run?” “As fast as a leopard.” “How fast are ya gonna run?” “As fast as a leopard!” “Then let’s see ya do it!!” At the beginning of the film, we saw Archy complete his race against the clock, as he flew across the wire in that runner’s pose to end all races – chest forward, head and arms thrown back. And now, the final still frame shows him in exactly that same position, another race ended…

In Frank’s agonized scream, we feel the loss, multiplied over 11,000 ANZACs, each one of them, a story like Archy’s and Frank’s; each one with family, good mates, dreams for a better life, and the potential to be anything but collateral damage.Many wonder out loud at what Muslims tell their troops to make them suicide bombers or how the Japanese ever made their Kamikazes crash into the decks of ships, but the Western world’s troops are no better in their seeming fanatic dedication to suicide when told simply that “their country needs them.” Archy is offered the post of runner but gives it up to Frank, desiring the role of martyr instead, seeing before him the futility of trench warfare and knowing full well his fate. Archy’s last letter to his mother illustrates that right up to the point of death the diggers held fast their fantasy: “There’s a feeling that we’re all involved in an adventure somehow larger than life.”

There was no other option addressed in trench tactics – if raising your head above ground and having it shot off could even be called tactics. Archy and the men around him fatalistically accepted this as their destiny. These men died in their thousands like lemmings, watching the line before them fall, then going over the top anyway, again and again, as if any one suicidal surge might benefit the greater good.

GALLIPOLI, like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT or PATHS OF GLORY, puts paid to the opprobrious oxymoron “War Hero.” By definition, anyone who engages in an act of war (political maneuvering that causes physical battle) is nothing short of a congenital idiot; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. No, I’m not a “peacenik” – sometimes conflict is unavoidable, to destroy something that threatens your well-being – but to recruit through lies, kill without need or utility, destroy for greed, to further someone else’s political agenda through mindless human slaughter; all these things are idiocy, hypocrisy and stupidity. The Heroes of War are awarded medals for having killed the most people (i.e. the most brutal butchers) or having survived and returned from battle (basically, someone who took cover really, really well). Those are criteria for HEROES? Guess Hitler was a war hero after all. Just like Colin Powell and Osama bin Laden. (Consistency, folks! Don’t award Powell Distinguished Service Medals – under the euphemism “exceptionally meritorious service” – without considering the “exceptionally meritorious service” Adolph or Osama provided their countrymen.)

War is Mel.

This movie is “heroic” for demonstrating how UNHEROIC war truly is.When the whistle blows and the troops surge over the sandbags in a futile crash into enemy fire, the few who hesitate are branded “cowards,” when in fact, they are the true heroes; not for the banal fact that they survived a war, but for the fact that they refused to die for a cause they knew nothing about and cared even less for.

GALLIPOLI is one of the great Australian films and one of the greatest anti-war films.

Both Lee and Gibson were poised on the brink of stardom after this film and Lee somehow failed to make the leap. Like Han Solo, it was the “dark one” who went on to major filmic success. By 1987, Mark Lee was doing television serials, while Mel Gibson had completed three MAD MAX films and had just been turned into a LETHAL WEAPON.

I think it was that smooth bottom…

END

LOCK, STOCK comes at us with two smoking barrels.

“Right! Let’s sort the buyers from the spyers, the needy from the greedy and those who love me from the ones who don’t…”

Poffy Jones

Bacon (Jason Statham) and Eddie (Nick Moran) work a street crowd with their hot merchandise. Cops. They flee. When the film suddenly crashes into super-slomo, and a hard, street-savvy narration kicks in (Alan Ford‘s voice) telling us of Bacon’s and Eddie’s street chicanery on its last legs, we hark back to the opening of PULP FICTION (where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are dialoguing intriguingly and cooing like lovebirds over coffee in a diner one minute and in the next, suddenly viciously holding up the joint). Like PULP, this Guy Ritchie-penned and -directed trash whore promises to be a dialogue-luscious film with a rabid style all its own.It is.

With a frenetic energy that few films today possess, LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS is the work of a film-maker who remembers that movies are, first and foremost, Entertainment. Guy Ritchie is Danny Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, 28 DAYS LATER) on crank.

Along with Statham and Moran, Dexter Fletcher (as Soap) and Jason Flemyng (as “Tubby” Tommy) round out the quartet of twenty-something East End street friends who pool their cash to enter Eddie, a card-shark natural, into a life-or-death stakes card game with local gangster and porn king, “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale (P.H. Moriarty).

Which Eddie, through Harry’s cheating, promptly loses.

So begins Eddie and the boys’ crooked quest to deliver “half a million knickers” to Harry before Harry’s bulldog, Barry “The Baptist” (Lenny McLean) starts claiming their digits as vig.

That’s the short version. In the final telling, LOCK, STOCK – filmed with a leached look that makes London look even stinkier and gloomier than it actually is – is a Mobius strip of black comedic robbery and nihilistic bloodletting, shot through a revolving-door of criss-crossing, cross-killing, kill-switching plots.

Concurrent with our desperate hero foursome (calling them anti-heroes does not even suffice for their level of “anti,” so let’s drop the prefix and stop pretending we don’t support bad guys), there are the dazed and confused marijuana farmers led by the willowy Winston (Steven Mackintosh), whom we first meet inanely arguing over locking the front gate; there are Eddie’s neighbors, a gang of thieves as ruthless as they are inept, led by a chilling sadist, Dog (Frank Harper), whom we first meet as he swipes golf balls off the nose of a victim while machete-ing another hanging upside down; there is a black gang of giants led by a cockney midget with a fashion-challenged ‘fro, Rory Breaker (Vas Blackwood), whose introduction to the story sees him setting a man on fire for insisting he change the pub television channel; then there are the two clueless, low-rent bandits (Jake Abraham and Victor McGuire) who burgle the smoking barrels of the title with knicker-knotting consequences; there’s Big Chris (Vinnie Jones), a merciless hitman who is yet intent on raising his son with manners, and a hardened bar owner, JD, who shuns the maelstrom, not for want of street-cred, but because he is miles beyond mustered (played by Sting, as hard as the day he formed The Police).

A waste of good ping pong tiddly.

With a source-music soundtrack that swivels effortlessly between savage, scarring guitars to ska figures and traditional Jewish plinkings, and slang so rich your ears will gain ten pounds (“not with Liberia’s deficit in ya skyrocket,” “orders an aristotle of the most ping pong tiddly in the nuclear sub”), LOCK, STOCK wends its complex way to a furiously satisfying climax, twists aplenty and a final shot that will renew your faith in creative storytelling like a date with a drunk Hans Christian Andersen.

This movie is a modern classic.

No matter the Serious Critics denigrating style over substance, LOCK, STOCK – stylistic to a fault – defiantly does not lack for substance. It is no secret that the nature of the medium is reliant on style, so it is as silly to say that a movie should lack “style” as a rock band should lack “image” – these are the selling points of the products. Style is an integral aspect of a modern director’s toolbox and Ritchie has consciously chosen to present his product this stylishly – and his cup overfloweth with substance too.

Yet Ritchie’s stylistic verve earns him his share of detractors, some rationally decrying the new breed of crash-cutting, shotgun storytellers, some just too slow-witted to keep up with the swagger of the Ritchies, Tarantinos and Boyles – subsequently, there are only two ways to take this movie: either not at all, or lock, stock and two smoking barrels…

END

SNATCH will grab.

Bullet Tooth Poffy

Released on the heels of his stylish, 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’s 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 dialogue 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 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 detractors. Ultimately, SNATCH is not 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.

END