2 out of 5

Director: Guy Ritchie

I’m not sure.  My lack of words regarding RocknRolla are indicative of my feeling about the flick in general – yes, it’s a thankful return to the style of scripting and subject matter that made Ritchie known, and absolutely acts as a pacing and style precursor to his slick and awesome Sherlock Holmes reboot, but unlike those films – and even unlike Revolver, which was, in my opinion, crappy – Rock gives us almost no reason at all to watch these people, to watch this story unfold, to care.  You could say it gets by on energy, which is what Lock Stock did (since it was similarly distanced from its characters and more obsessed with the fun of it all), but there’s a carryover from Revolver in a lot of Guy’s framing of scenes here – a more static view, lighting the scene, hanging the camera, letting it work – and so these clever little scenarios just seem to plod along to nowhere.  As we jump from bit to bit – Gerard Butler and Idris Elba as low-rent toughs trying to earn money to pay back a heavy for a poorly brokered deal, Tom Wilkinson as our superhero rockstar, Guy’s badass template, Thandie Newton’s temptress double-dealing accountant – and as Guy ropes us along with details crossing from story to story and a painting MacGuffin sort of at the center of it all, we’re just trusting it will get tied together because it HAS to, not because it makes any sense to.  So it feels a little forced.  Thankfully, despite a lot of fresh, hip faces (hi, Jeremy Piven), Guy has also learned scripting restraint, and so the dialogue isn’t the Tarantino-esque slang of Lock and Snatch.  The jokes and flow are very natural.  It was a good film to get out of his system, and having stepped fully back to the plate with Holmes, I would look forward to the mentioned sequel, but an hour and a half of this fairly empty movie neither satisfied the need for a good crime film or a good Ritchie film.