RocknRolla
Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla has one thing in its favour: it is better than his last two movies - Swept Away, the awful Madge-on-a-beach romantic comedy that fared so badly in the US it never even made it to British cinema screens, and the nearly incoherent Revolver. Here Guy Ritchie returns to the familiar territory of London’s seedy underworld that we saw in the 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its 2000 follow-up Snatch.
The problem with RocknRolla is that despite a homoerotic twist and a fresh cast, we’ve basically seen it all before. With the exception of a couple of tough-talking females, Ritchie essentially offers us ‘geezer’ cinema created around his trademark formula - gangland parody packed out with well-mounted action sequences, slick visuals, eclectic scoring and some witty hardman banter from an array of mockney thesps.
One of these is Archie, the familiar narrator who sets the tone and explains complicated plot twist to slower members of the audience. At the start of the film he helpfully deciphers its title, which refers to a particularly rapacious sort of London gangster: “We all like a bit of the good life: some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour or the fame. But a rocknrolla, oh, he’s different. Why? Because a real rocknrolla wants the f****** lot.”
The grand scheme centres around London’s property boom - a somewhat outmoded theme thanks to the credit crunch. Gerard Butler plays One Two, a small-time swindler hoping to make it big in real estate. Along with partners-in-crime Mumbles (Idris Elba) and Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy), One Two intercepts some money which Russian property tiycoon Uri Omovic (Karel Roden) intended for Lenny Cole, an influence-peddling, bureaucrat-bribing crime boss of the old school, as payment for helping him secure a lucrative deal.
Not surprisingly for a Ritchie flick, the deception sets off an interlocking chain of contrivances, coincidences, intricate plans and desperate improvisations. To repay Cole, One Two and his crew sign on as heisters for Stella (Thandie Newton), a silky and crooked accountant working for criminally inclined Russian billionaire Uri Obamavich (Karel Roden). Uri has also, as a token of good faith, lent Lenny his “lucky painting”, and this of course gets nicked. The film then follows the fate of the painting, as well as the search for a mole within the ranks who has reported certain gang members to the police and got some locked up.
The film’s greatest strength is its characters who , whilst sporting the trademark east-end accents and Tarantinian chatter, each come with their own quirks. There’s Tank (Nonso Anozie), an Anglo-African pugilist with a penchant for period drama; Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy), a gang member who delivers a rather touching coming-out speech the night before he goes to prison; and Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), a junk rocker who has faked his own death to sell more CDs.
However, the colourful array of characters can’t dupe us into believing RocknRolla to be anything novel. Lock Stock was a masterpiece, but it’s been elaborated on since by other sharp, gangland capers with their own spin, such as like Layer Cake and The Bank Job. RocknRolla in comparison feels tired and jaded. It’s entertaining but nothing new.
