January 18–25, 2001

movies

Guy Smiley

Pitt stains: A dressed-down Brad Pitt in Snatch

Guy Ritchie grins his way through violence with Snatch.

by Cindy Fuchs

Snatch

Written and directed by Guy Ritchie
A Screen Gems Release

Snatch is all about attitude and style. And guys, lots of guys. Quick and snarky, packed with brutish hooligans and smart-ass crooks, it’s a guys’ throw-down movie and then some. Its angles are edgy, its editing speedy and its storyline progressively nonlinear, to the point that trying to figure out what happens when becomes mostly irrelevant. It’s not concerned with cause and effect or even any actual events per se. It’s focused on how those events come off on screen, how great they look, or better, how fast they look. As Bad Boy Lincoln (played by supercool music guy Goldie), puts it when asked to dispose of a one-armed corpse, "I create the bodies, I don’t erase the bodies." Okay then. Show me the bodies.

Writer-director Guy Ritchie certainly knows a bit about such showmanship (even aside from his all-show-all-the-time marriage). His first feature, 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, was a similar thrill-ride of a movie, a clever bit of low-budget neo-violence involving similar characters, similar intertwining subplots that come together in a tumultuous crescendo and several of the same actors, including former U.K. football star Vinnie Jones, Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng and Alan Ford.

Snatch is more of everything — more characters, more bumbling, more hysteria, more money, more bodies. The pomo aesthetic choices (and even some of the plot points) obviously derive from Lock, Stock, Trainspotting and the Tarantino oeuvre. The minimal storyline stems from a diamond heist, beautifully introduced under the opening credits as a series of video-surveillance monitor shots that follow a crew of thieves — disguised as Hasidic Jews and including Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro) — as they make their way into an Antwerp jewel merchant’s office. In a dazzling blast of fast cuts and zooms, they snatch an 86-carat prize. From here, these crooks and others make mistake after mistake, which eventually come together in one deliriously choreographed sequence of events involving three or four sets of criminals, all on their way to get the diamond, either intentionally or by accident. These events repeat from different perspectives so that you can’t be sure what happened until you see all the versions — and even then you might not know exactly.

As a plainly pleased-with-itself exercise in excess and spectacle, the film features any number of eccentric characters and comic-violent climaxes. In the characters category, Brad Pitt’s Irish gypsy boxer, One Punch Mickey, is probably the most outrageous. Ritchie says that when Pitt asked to appear in his next movie (after the actor saw Lock, Stock), they decided that it would be grand to remake the heartthrob, who signed on for much less than his usual $20 million fee, so that he’s physically beat-up and verbally incomprehensible (not that this is in itself a brainstorm — see also Pitt’s roles in Fight Club and 12 Monkeys). Mickey is recruited to take a fall in an illegal bare-knuckle boxing match by two promoters (Jason Statham’s Turkish, who also serves as our personable narrator and Stephen Graham’s Tommy), who owe the local mucky-muck, Brick Top (Alan Ford), a substantial wad of quid. When it turns out that Mickey is unable to take this fall — by virtue of his moral and physical constitution, not to mention his undying love for his dear "mam" — all the lads are in rather deep "shite."

Somehow and eventually, their predicament intersects with the stolen diamond business, which was, incidentally, commissioned by a New York-based gangster, Avi (Dennis Farina). When that deal goes sour due to Franky’s gambling addiction, Avi jets to London to retrieve his goods. At the same time, the plot expands to include a few small-time London hustlers, the aforementioned Lincoln, Vinny (Robbie Gee), Sol (Lennie James) and their first-time getaway driver Tyrone (first-time actor Ade) — all of whom are black. Their antics are surely brainless (they use a set of "replica" guns to take on a professional gunman), and some critics (including Tricky) have called out the film for racism. But truth be told, the film treats most everyone — the Irish pikers, the London lads, the American Jews — with equal disrespect.