The well may have run dry, but that hasn’t stopped Ritchie from dipping into it once more. Thrust yet again into the London underworld, we are introduced to an ensemble of ruthless gangsters and incompetent crooks. There’s an overly complicated real estate scam, stolen cash, a stolen painting, and the search for a drugged out rock star.
Ritchie has been reluctant to grow as a filmmaker ever since making his big splash on the Post-Tarantino cinematic landscape with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. He’s essentially remade the same film three times. Then again, when he did try to stretch his directing muscles, he made the universally reviled Swept Away.
With RocknRolla, the former Mr. Madonna’s flaws show more and more. MTV style editing and fancy camera tricks act as feints for otherwise bland sequences. Ritchie stuffs his script with far too many subplots and characters in a vain attempt to bolster his page count. The only way to distinguish any of those characters is by arbitrarily goofy nicknames like One Two, Mumbles, and Johnny Quid. It won’t be by their well-rounded personalities since they have none.
To Ritchie’s credit, he still manages to collect a wealth of talented actors to play his cartoonish characters. Not all of them are properly utilized, the usually entertaining Jeremy Piven turns in a bland performance, for example. As one of the hottest accountants in the world, Thandie Newton displays a sexy cool that might be the closest we’ll ever get to a gangland Audrey Hepburn. I also enjoyed Mark Strong’s (also great in Body of Lies and Stardust) excellent turn as our narrator and the right-hand man of Lenny Cole played to perfection by Tom Wilkinson (”There’s no school like the old school.”).
Rating: **
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