Snatch

December 12, 2004

Rated: R Runtime: 103 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Snatch is one of those movies that is so screwed up that I do not even know how to begin to describe it. And I do not necessarily mean “screwed up” in a bad way. But it’s difficult to even classify this movie. Is it a Comedy? Action? Thriller? Drama? The answer is really a little of all of the above, but we’re listing it as action as there is more action than anything else, but not by a wide margin.

Snatch

Guy Ritchie, who recently married Madonna, wrote and directed this film. This is only his second major release with the other being Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. My impression of him as a writer especially is that he must be a big Tarantino fan as the best nutshell description of Snatch that I can think of is “an English version of Pulp Fiction“. As a director, he may have watched a few too many of Oliver Stone’s recent films. He uses some of those quick artistic edits which we so hated in movies like Any Given Sunday and Natural Born Killers.

The movie starts with the theft of a 86 karat diamond that is absolutely flawless. And the story revolves around the pursuit of this diamond and who is going to end up with it. We are introduced to a slew of really colorful characters and groups of characters. And as is the case with Pulp Fiction the substories of each of these characters gets intertwined as this diamond passes through, by and around their lives. Along the way we are treated to some really unusual situations, many of which end up being quite funny.

The pacing of the movie is sporadic. There are some slow spots. The cast does an excellent job though as you can tell alot of these guys really enjoyed playing these totally over the top characters. While watching the movie, and thinking through what I thought of it the star ratings floating through my head went as low as a 1 and as high as a strong 4. We finally decided on 3 stars. After all, just getting to see Brad Pitt get a mudhole stomped in his butt alone makes it worth the price of admission!

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 3 Stars, Action, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, DVD, Dennis Farina, Jason Flemyng, Jason Statham, R