Revolver

It’s likely that I’m not the only fan of Guy Ritchie and his early films such as ‘Snatch’ and ‘Lock, stock and two smoking barrels.’ These movies are visually inventive, well paced and full of hilarious characters and situations. Unfortunately married life seems to have had a detrimental effect to his creativity and until ‘Revolver’ came out he had not directed anything comparable to his prior films. Unfortunately while it’s easy to compare ‘Revolver’ to his other movies it is hard to do so flatteringly. At first I had hoped that it was because Guy was working with a terrible script but once I researched the movie on IMDB turns out he actually wrote it himself.  

Still one cannot blame everything on the director and when you break it down this movie is more of a potluck of influences, but not in a cool ‘Kill Bill’ way. Let’s see, first of all Jason Statham brings his dubious acting talent to the party playing the role of Jake, a professional gambler. While I must admit that Jason is a great action star, this movie is stingy on the action and requires a lot of emotional range that he seems incapable of delivering. Ray Liotta brings his big teary eyes and plays an embarrassingly vulnerable mob boss who doesn’t wear pants often enough. Andre 3000 and Vincent Pastore sleepwalk through some painfully trite dialog about gaming theory while acting like sophisticated thugs. And I can only guess that Luc Besson’s contribution is a certain socially awkward hitman with a heart of gold.

Now while the movie does have a few drop dead gorgeous scenes the terrible pacing makes it really difficult to get far enough into the film to actually experience them. Still keep an eye out for a great assassination attempt in a restaurant and some downright poetic slow motion shots. Ok, at this point you are probably wondering what the plot of the movie is, since I have not yet mentioned it. Hmm… I’m not sure what the plot is myself. I guess you could describe it as a heist film where the main character has no choice but to help out a pair of mysterious thugs who have saved his life. As they run around committing crimes all manner of pseudo intellectual sawdust is thrown around and just when things cannot get more contrived or annoying the movie ends anticlimactically. One could say that the film hints towards a deeper meaning but this is no ‘Lost Highway’ and Guy Ritchie is no David Lynch. While Revolver is certainly a movie for completists, do your friends a favor and watch this one by yourself.