Ranking The Best Characters From Snatch - 20 Years Later
It's not a tickling competition; these lads are out to hurt each other.
What do we know about diamonds? Not as much as we know about Guy Ritchie's iconic 2000 Brit hit. It's hard to believe it's been twenty years, but that's the nature of time; it moves faster than a hare outrunning two lurchers.
Two decades on, Snatch remains arguably the most celebrated (not to mention quotable) of Ritchie's oeuvre. It brings all of the director's trademarks together, including the gritty underworld setting, inimitable visual style, rollicking soundtrack, and larger than life characters into one supremely entertaining package. Snatch stands at the top of the mountain when it comes not only to British crime films, but modern British cinema as a whole.
That's not even mentioning the film's standout quality: its humour. Snatch is frequently hilarious, with every one of its sparkling characters spouting lines that live long in the memory with wit and style. The diamond caper at the centre of the plot spins ruthless gangsters, jewellery enthusiasts, bumbling wannabes and travelling boxers into a breathless web of violence and laughs.
It's nigh on impossible to watch Snatch without its characters carving out permanent places in that part of the brain seemingly reserved for pop culture references and quotes. While the film is filled with standout faces and chases, here are the best, brashest, and not necessarily brightest characters to be found. What were you expecting to see? "Zee Germans?"
13. Gorgeous George
Who: Burly brawler who meets the wrong end of Mickey O'Neil's fist.
What he knows about diamonds: nothing at all. He's not called Gorgeous George for his reputation as a hopeless romantic, that's for sure. George is a boxer under the employ of Jason Statham's Turkish, slated to take on one of the villainous Brick Top's motley crew of fighters with a generous sum to be won... provided he takes a dive at the right time.
Before the fight, however, George makes the bad judgement of accepting a bare-knuckle boxing match with Brad Pitt's Mickey O'Neil over a dodgy caravan, while acting as a bodyguard overseeing the doomed transaction. Though he doesn't seem to be in much trouble at first facing the much smaller O'Neil, he is soon knocked spark out by a single punch.
Despite his initial introduction as a musclebound force of nature, his actual role in the story is to provide a mountainous obstacle for Mickey to make short work of - and in turn, proving the latter's own credentials for fighting.
Best quote: George implores Mickey to put an end to all this violence by pummelling him and yelling "Get back down, or you will NOT be coming up next time!".