RocknRolla

admin | September 5, 2008 | Comments (1)

RocknRolla

DIR/WRI: Guy Ritchie • PRO: Steve Clark-Hall, Susan Downey, Guy Ritchie, Joel Silver • DOP: David Higgs • ED: James Herbert • DES: Richard Bridgland • CAST: Gerard Butler, Thandie Newton, Jeremy Piven, Ludacris, Tom Wilkinson

RocknRolla is Guy Ritchie’s hopeful return to the East End milieu and the commercial success of Lock, Stock and Snatch, and even though it’s not quite as good or as fresh as those films were, it’s good enough to make you want to pretend he hasn’t done anything in the meantime.

The film starts with a pretty funky credit sequence, followed by a lot of exposition, much of it in voiceover. It moves quite fast but still manages to be a bit dull (it’s basically about real estate), so the film takes a while to get its bearings. After that, it gets more entertaining. There’s not a lot of action, at least for a while, but when it comes it works well enough, and there’s plenty of humour in the meantime, which is probably the strong suit of the film.

In general, it’s solidly made, if a bit gloomy visually. The acting is decent, though Jeremy Piven and Jimi Mistry seem to struggle a bit, which is surprising because they’re usually good. The film is at least partly named after a rock star character who Ritchie seems to be very fond of, even giving him a nice payoff at the end, although aside from that, you really wouldn’t mistake him for a major character, especially in such a big cast. The only notable female role is played by Thandie Newton, and seems to go unnamed throughout the movie, though she doesn’t really need a name: she’s basically a generic devious, geezer-loving posh bird. But maybe this is understandable, as that is a convention of gangster movies, and aside from that the film tackles racism and homophobia in a well-intentioned way.

There are moments where it seems like a clever movie playing at being dumb, and others where it seems like a dumb movie trying to be clever. At times it feels a little over-written, and as if it’s trying a bit too hard, which would be a shame, because Guy Ritchie is a good enough writer/director that he doesn’t need to do that. In the end, while it’s not as good as his first two movies, it is a step in the right direction.