Guy Ritchie
Revolver

The talent is still there. What is missing is the flair of the early days, probably dissipated in the bath of presumption that Guy Ritchie subjected himself to. The formal composition bypasses the two previous films, actually going decisively beyond the qualitative standard achieved with The Snatch: the cinematography in Revolver is superb: scenes are splendidly depicted with a color correction that saturates the image, oozing creativity and cunning. The editing composes temporality by relying on dynamic variations that are simply spot-on, even though sometimes redundant: the explicit fictional nature of the representation is still a well-visible trademark, shaping Ritchie's artistic signature (a Tarantino legacy brought to an exacerbated stylization already in Lock & Stock). The Tennessee filmmaker is once again referenced in the animated inserts, qualitatively excellent: a borrowed idea that begins to trigger the suspicion of a certain creative shortage hidden in the plot.

The performances are at respectable levels: Liotta/Macha stands out in the cast, where Benjamin and Pastore carve out playful performances that are more than acceptable, only partly undermined by the ungrateful script they are called to perform in the second part of the film. Stumbling is Ritchie's fetish, the Jason Statham who seemed tailor-made for the slightly grotesque performances in Lock & Stock and The Snatch, but who appears neutered and expressionless in a role that would require a psychological depth that is entirely absent. Jake Green turns out to be a puppet lacking in substance and authority: there is never the impression, not even at the end, of being deus ex machina of the pseudo-dreamlike representation that was the author's intent.

Ultimately, the film is there, what's missing - as I mentioned - is the plot. The homodiegetic narration already suggests from the outset the aspiration to the psychoanalytic drama, and the clues are decidedly too numerous and too obvious, leading to two major moments of disappointment: reaching the understanding of the foundational idea of the fabula already halfway through the film, and discovering at the end that the intuition was sadly correct. This would represent a flaw in the "composition of suspense" - Chatman would say - but the disappointment is amplified into anger by the very nature of the fabula being guessed, which turns out to be the case.

The Snatch received favorable reviews that did not hesitate to poke at its cloning nature compared to the previous film. In this case, Ritchie has decidedly turned the page but has naively betrayed the very essence of the Tarantino topos (explicit fictionality in the service of an amoral narrative). Instead, Guy attempted the paradox, seeking an impossible semiosis between a form of which he is a skillful craftsman and an ambitious yet convoluted signification, which ends up becoming awkwardly pretextual.

Missed opportunity.