"There's no school like the old school", proclaims head mobster Lenny Cole (
Tom Wilkinson) in
RocknRolla, the latest piece of incoherent and pretentious garbage from Brit writer/director
Guy Ritchie who after a decade in this business still feels like an insecure teenager taking up smoking so that he can look cool. You know the kind I mean, the teenager who doesn't really like the taste but does it anyway because that's what his mates do. He wants to fit in, look cool. He buys himself a leather jacket and wears sunglasses. He watches Arnie in
The Terminator and thinks it would be cool to ride a bike. It's not cool, it makes him a fake. And Guy Ritchie to me feels like a fake. Nothing ever rings true in any of his films. Progressing not an inch from his days on
Lock, Stock and
Snatch,
RocknRolla harbours all the previous elements of his filmography into a mix that attempts to be funny, cool and highly stylized popcorn entertainment. Though in reality, it barely even registers on any of those low reaching levels.
Filling in for the presumably busy
Jason Statham is the ever growling Scot
Gerard Butler who I suggest as One, Two (you seen the nonsense we are dealing with here?) is the good guy of this piece because among the racists, bigots and homophobes that are present in the film, his best mate is gay (a terrific performance from the ever likeable
Tom Hardy as Handsome Bob) and his partner in the criminal underworld, is a black man named Mumbles (
Idris Elba). They are low grade gangsters, moving from quick and easy one shot jobs that earn them enough money to get by. They live the RocknRolla life. When a Russian mobster (who has an expensive football box, owns a yacht... a
Roman Abramovich caricature from the not so subtle Ritchie) puts to work on a real estate scam to earn him more millions, One Two and Mumbles are given the job by an flirtatious accountant Stella (
Thandie Newton) to steal the money, where she will of course take a princely cut herself. From there, twists and turns occur a plenty, involving mob boss Lenny Cole's young son, a druggie rock-star by the name of Johnny Quid (
Tony Kebbell), two characters I never did understand played by Americans
Jeremy Piven and
Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and a really solid performance from
Mark Strong as Lenny's No. 2. If there is one thing Ritchie has got right, it's the casting of Prof. Moriarty for his upcoming
Sherlock Holmes movie because this guy can portray as evil as it gets without doing much with his face. A terrific actor, and I enjoyed his presence here.
Anyhow, there's just no substance to this film, characters, scenes and situations just have no value. Every moment of the film is played for a "wink to the audience and look how cool we are" montage of shots. Look how cool Gerard Butler is as a hard man. Look how sexy Thandie Newton can walk in heels. Let's film their long anticipated (in the movie) sex scene as a 3 second montage. Look how clever I am to have created the main prize of the movie be a painting we never see. Boring. Tarantino did everything Ritchie does now, years ago... and way superior. The problem I've always had with Guy Ritchie is that there are no reasoning to his films. No reason why he shoots something one way and then shoots the next scene in another. He speeds some scenes up, then will film the next as a slowdown but with for no reasoning or value. There's no end result, he has no plan he just films each scene the way he wants to, the way he thinks will amuse him and look the coolest. The problem is, the kid who tries too hard to be cool... looks like a fool. Ritchie should learn a thing from
Joe Carnahan whose
Smokin' Aces was similar in many ways to this movie but a thousand times better. His characters more defined, some (most) sympathetic on some level, his camera gimmicks actually had a purpose to progress and enhance scenes, he had great moments of emotional substance, better use of music, better plot and more.
Smokin' Aces actually carried a lot of value but this one is just awful and I'm not surprised that Warner Bros. are dumping this film in the U.S. with a soft release. And then there's a grossly unfortunate scene, especially in today's climate in this country, of a stabbing assault with a pencil on a nightclub bodyguard which was played purely for violence fetishism and glorification. The scene make me me grimace that in a theatre where I was in packed full of older teenagers, the 17-19 crowd, that the movie whole heartedly promoted violence at every level. Sure there was the infamous "magic trick" in
The Dark Knight, a stabbing to the eye with a pencil but it never condoned violence the way this movie does. And The Joker was clearly the villain of that piece, in
RocknRolla and particularly that scene, the man dishing out the violence is the good guy... I think. Guy Ritchie, in Bond fashion at the end credits proclaims that the characters will return in
"The Real RocknRolla". I seriously hope not. Man do I fear for his
Sherlock Holmes now, he has to grow up for that movie. It has to happen now.
rating: 1.5