Guy Richie, the British director who makes the "laddiest" movies in the world, followed-up his arguably superior debut flick, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with a movie called Snatch. Now, don't take Snatch's inclusion on a list of this sort as an attack on the picture as a whole. It's a good movie, generally speaking, and an entertaining one (for the most part). But it's also a severely overrated one: a British Pulp Fiction that thinks it's a lot smarter than it actually is. Though it is (as the British may say) "a good laugh," it's also self-aware, indulgent and so far up its own a*se (another British phrase there) that it becomes almost laughable - nowhere near as witty as Richie believes. Yes, Brad Pitt is on fine form, and there are a lot of good, memorable characters on show, but Snatch also provokes something akin to a "So what?" reaction when it's all over with. Many of the sequences , after all, fall flat or fail to hit their marks. Number 92, you say? You gotta be f*cking joking, geezer!
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
