The double-entendre title of this second feature from British crime-comedy auteur and current Madonna plaything Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) should give you an idea of what to expect. Snatch is cool, crude, irreverent and funny as bloody hell. Working from his own screenplay, Ritchie weaves two seemingly unrelated events—the heist of a priceless diamond by a gang of rabbinical robbers, and the fixing of a bareknuckle boxing match—into a high-energy caper sparked by eminently watchable performances by Brad Pitt, Alan Ford and… a squeaking dog?
As he did with Two Smoking Barrels, Ritchie populates London with seedy East End yobbos, crooked lowlifes with names like Frankie Four Fingers, Brick Top, Boris the Blade and Bullet Tooth Tony. All are played by actors apparently chosen for their tough-lad looks. Ritchie fans will recognize several British alumni (including Jason Statham as Turkish, the illegal fight promoter at the heart of the movie), but the addition of Americans like Pitt (as One Punch Mickey, a gypsy bareknuckle champ who talks in a barely intelligible rapid-fire patois) and Benicio Del Toro (as the diamond-stealing compulsive gambler Frankie Four Fingers) is an obvious bid to make the film more accessible to Stateside audiences than its predecessor. No problem there: Del Toro is the coolest young actor working today, and Pitt is always at his best in grungy roles (see his amazing, underrated work in Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia). Equally welcome is the distinctive mustachioed mug of Dennis Farina, one of the few Yank actors who can match Ritchie’s cast of limey hard men for sheer ugliness. The best performance, though, is that of Alan Ford. Looking like Harvey Keitel with coke-bottle glasses and rotten yellow teeth, he makes fight-fixing crime boss Brick Top as thoroughly nasty inside as he is outside. Numerous other characters, including a hapless trio of black armed robbers, a Jewish-wannabe diamond fence and even a squeak-toy-swallowing dog, show up to further convolute the plot.
Propelled by dizzying flurries of fast-forward jump cuts and slang-filled, heavily accented dialogue, the film borrows from both the Scorsese school of urban realism and the Tarantino school of gangland violence as black-humour fantasy. It’s the sort of thing Dickens might have written if he’d been a rave-going soccer hooligan. (There’s even a character nicknamed the Bullet Dodger.) Even so, Ritchie’s kinetic ingenuity starts to get tedious as various characters are winnowed in inevitably dark-comic fashion. But then, near the end, he uncorks a fight sequence that combines the vivid physicality of a George Bellows painting with surreal black-and-white images of a fighter floating underwater. Having regained your full attention, he caps things off with an amusing full-circle twist. If you’ll forgive the expression, this Snatch is worth taking a peek at.
(3/4)