Country:
United Kingdom
Recognizable Faces:
Gerard Butler
Idris Elba
Thandie Newton
Tom Hardy
Ludacris
Directed by:
Guy Ritchie
The greatest achievement of Guy Ritchie is to make the same movie over and over again, but make it more and more entertaining. Seriously, there is a Guy-Ritchie-Formula. Action movie with a complex plot involving way too many characters, witty one liners and hilarious misunderstanding that will get your lead miraculously out of trouble. Guy Ritchie has got his formula down to a science and RockNRolla might be the purest product the pusher-of-Brit-gangster-movie has ever put on to the market.
Cinema lovers, leave your brain home, because you know damn too well what to expect. Guy Ritchie defines his movies by his characters. The RockNRolla crew (as known as The Wild Bunch) might be his most adorable bunch of low life criminals yet. RockNRolla is the story of Mr. One-Two (Butler) and Mumbles (the great great Idris Elba) who get shafted by local mobster Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) in a real estate move and find themselves in great need for fast money (see the pattern here?)
Fate brings Stella (Newton)an old acquaintance of One-Two, up front again with a mysterious but well timed heist proposition. The stolen money being indeed the payment of Lenny Cole's biggest associate Uri Omovich. Then starts this cat and mouse game where Omovich seeks his constantly stolen money, Cole seeks the Russian's favorite painting that was snatched from his house by none other than his step son and The Wild Bunch along with Stella, are trying to duck the avalanche of dangers coming their way.
Like I said, Guy Ritchie has a gift for characters. The Wild Bunch would be his greatest characters because they are his most human. Ritchie here skimmed the clichés as much as he could and gave honest, vulnerable characters, who show flaws on screen and give the male-bonding one-liners instead of the cheesy action movie ones. Of course, they are way too nice and their friendship is way too sincere for them to be believable criminals, but Guy Ritchie's movies have always required a heavy dose of suspension-of-disbelief (I'm not going to teach you anything here).
As far as likeable-gangster movies go, RockNRolla, like Snatch, is a renewal, but it's also a genre unique to Guy Ritchie, which leads me to believe he would be even more successful as a novelist, where his patterns would disappear through the medium. RockNRolla is so formatted it almost could be a video game franchise. There is little to no originality in the form, but it's the content that shines brighter than ever. It's a furious two hours ride with unforgettable characters. See it.
SCORE: 93%
