Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Missing the mark

Toby Young

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

RocknRolla
15, Nationwide

RocknRolla has many of the same elements as Lock, Stock, but it feels less like an expression of the Zeitgeist than a cynical attempt to duplicate the previous film’s success. (Snatch, Ritchie’s immediate follow-up to Lock, Stock, felt a bit like that, too.) To give you a sense of just how out of step RocknRolla is with the times, the villains are all engaged in various property scams. Indeed, a voiceover in the opening reel informs us that property values in London are only going one way: up. As you can imagine, this produced general hilarity in the preview theatre; but even if we forgive that lapse it points to a larger problem, which is that RocknRolla’s characters appear to have been transplanted from the 1990s. London is still a boomtown with no hint that the country is in the grip of a recession. The only respect in which they have been updated is that they’re now openly tolerant of homosexuality. There’s a ludicrously didactic subplot in which a Scottish armed robber named One Two (Gerard Butler) discovers that his best friend — Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy) — is gay and gradually comes to terms with that fact. Thank you, Madonna.

In truth, none of this would matter if Ritchie exhibited the same sharpness that he possessed ten years ago. But RocknRolla feels baggy and undisciplined, the work of a filmmaker whose heart isn’t really in it. For instance, there’s a moment towards the end of the film when Tom Wilkinson’s character — an underworld kingpin — slaps one of his henchmen and says, ‘Think before you drink before you drive me crazy.’ That line is unworthy of Ritchie, who proved himself a master of snappy one-liners in Lock, Stock. In general, the film gives the impression of having been made in a hurry, with several takes included that should have ended up on the cutting-room floor. It is as if Ritchie is nursing a bruised ego after the failure of his last two films and is deliberately withholding his talent in order to punish moviegoers for not being more supportive.