{sidebar id=32}Guy Ritchie became one of my favorite (and
many others delighted fans`) directors after masterpieces like Lock, Stock
and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. But the higher you climb, the
hardest the fall is, and that exactly happened with his previous work: Swept
Away, a movie to forget, featuring his wife Madonna, which was smashed
without mercy by critic and public.
So there was a lot of curiosity around his
new film, Revolver, to see if Ritchie would come back to his origins.
And the initial plot certainly reminds his earlier films: gangsters, action,
acid dialogues… He even eliminated the scenes where Madonna appeared trying to
avoid the “kiss of death” that his wife had given to the previous failed work.
But once you get immersed in the story, you can see that there is not much left
from the first successful films mentioned above if not for the repeated
appearance of his “fetish” actor: Jason Statham, perfect in his work as
usual. Ray Liotta appears as
maybe the best of the whole film, in the role of a tanned and despotic mafia
boss that totally suits him.
Ritchie had warned that this time he wanted
to make a film for intelligent people… and alas that the movie is not easy to
follow! The timeline is broken successively, the thoughts, the real facts and
the imagination of the characters is often mixed, and you really have to pay
attention to catch the subtle angles of the story. This time the sharp
dialogues are not aimed at making you smile, but at making you reflect about
some philosophical questions. The chess game and strategies to win is a great
leitmotiv all over the movie, and looks like Ritchie wanted to create a chess
game also inside our minds. But at the end my feeling is that the product got “over
baked”. Ritchie wanted to play to be a director resembling Christopher
Nolan, David Fincher and himself at the same time, instead of just being
happy of showing his personal style, leading to the viewers and critics to be
still trying to decide if this is a masterpiece, or a piece of shit. Decide
yourselves, but my advice is that maybe watching the film for a second time can
help you understand it more (or maybe not). I still prefer the Guy Ritchie less
philosophical and more into purely entertainment.