Revolver (Dvd) - Ashleigh

There has been a lot of bad press about this movie. A lot of it centers around the fact that with this film Guy Ritchie unsuccessfully tries to go back to his staple, gangster flicks, after laying the goose egg Swept Away (2002) starring his horrible wife. Still more of it points out the fact that a movie that was released in Britain in 2005 and took more than three years to come out in America (it went straight to DVD and came out last week on March 18, 2008) is not a good sign for the quality of a film. Still more of it focuses on the fact that this Kabbalah-centric film is too serious and too complicated for anyone to enjoy.

I must admit, I agree with all of these sentiments. But to make a short story long: After hearing, over three years ago, that Jason Statham would be returning to work with Ritchie I was elated.

A side note: I, like most twenty year olds, love Snatch (2000) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). I own about fourteen movies and these two are privileged enough to be part of my collection. I don’t feel it is necessary to purchase movies for repeat viewings as I rarely view a movie more than once; the miniscule cases that I do actually watch a movie more than once, I purchase it. So, having these films in my library is a unique situation, thus as you can understand, I couldn’t wait for Revolver to jump the pond.

So, I waited. And waited. And eventually forgot. But, the other day while traipsing through the local Blockbuster Revolver stared back at me. I looked to my wife for the oh-crap-I’m-going-to-have-to-watch-this-aren’t-I look - it was there, but she approved! Jennie and I quickly exchanged our Project Runway season 3: Disc 3 from Blockbuster Online and hurried home. I had heard everything that was bad about this film, but I didn’t want to believe it. I tried to think that maybe people just didn’t like that he had made English Gangster Flick 3, because, as we can all admit here, Lock, Stock and Snatch are basically the same film. And if that were the case, if Ritchie had simply made another English Gangster movie I would have been happy. I tried to dismiss the critics. I thought maybe it took this long to cross the pond because Ritchie was unhappy with the packaging. Maybe, just maybe, this movie was so awesomely complicated that not many people got it and the film was waiting to be cracked open like an egg till all the juices flowed out. But, it was an egg alright, a horribly stinky rotten egg.

The movie centers around Jake Green (Jason Statham) who is told, after being released from prison, that he has three days before he dies, they don’t really bother to tell you what aliment he has. He is forced to work for gangsters who are extorting two other gangsters. There is a lot of money involved, people get shot, chess is talked about, and Statham seemingly gets existentially duped. I can’t even really describe why this movie was so awful but I will attempt to. There seems to be no motivation for Statham’s character to work with the first set of gangsters, he just simply starts working for them. Their motivation is also seemingly lost on me as they start a war between two other factions of gangsters for no reason. Why they do this and what they get from it - well, it turns out that they are figments of Jake’s imagination cooked up to force Jake trough the existential ringer. The worst part of this film comes in the form of a long monologue about how the only real con is the one that each individual portrays to himself, namely “I am me” and “me is greed”. This, according to Jake Green, is the biggest con of them all. Guy Ritchie attempts to show this inner struggle with an annoying shoutfest between Statham, Statham, and Statham. Using fast edits and overlapping tracks he attempts to create this dizzying fight between the ego and the I. And, I guess, the real Jake Green wins? But really did I care? The film ends and as the credits role Ritchie shows interviews with psychologists who wax philosophically about the greatest trick we play on ourselves is thinking “I am me.”

3 out of 10: Yes, it is as bad as you have heard, the only redeeming item would be particular shots which were chosen and shot to perfection.