"Snatch"

Keep your eyes wide open in this speedy, jumbled thug movie -- otherwise you'll miss Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and a whole lot of nothing.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jan 23, 2001 | It takes a very clever schoolboy to make a movie as elaborately empty as Guy Ritchie's "Snatch." In Ritchie's world, more is supposedly more: At least a dozen characters who figure prominently in the maze of hidden doorways, curvy roads and blind alleys substitute for a plot in "Snatch." Intimidating cockney underworld thugs, none-too-bright entrepreneurial bunglers, tattooed Irish gypsy boxers and diamond thieves with comically heavy Yiddish lilts are supposed to represent a street-smart version of life's rich diversity as their paths crisscross and crash.

But writer-director Ritchie isn't interested in enjoying the labyrinthine story as it unwinds; he's fixated instead on racing to the end so he can wow us with his ability to suture up a straggly, lumpy narrative that he hasn't bothered to make us care about from the beginning. He's a showoff in the purest sense, and "Snatch" is nothing but a monkey-bar dangler of a movie.

As a stylist, Ritchie is an unusual case. He favors gritty jumbles of slow motion, foxy cutting and dialogue that whizzes by, alerting you that you should probably pay close attention if you have any interest in following the plot. But both "Snatch" and Ritchie's previous feature, 1998's "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," suffer from an odd high-octane dopiness -- they both amble by with lightning speed. Ritchie wants you to think the action is moving very quickly, when there are actually interminably long stretches where nothing much happens at all. Early on, "Snatch" injects you with a sense of urgency. But that only intensifies the feeling of being screwed by the time the ending finally putters into view.

"Snatch" is supposed to be something of a shaggy dog story. But unlike, say, Bryan Singer's 1995 "The Usual Suspects," which feels as if it has been shaped with a scalpel (and whose characters are cut just as distinctly), "Snatch" is loose and scattered even as it pretends to be taut. As with "Lock, Stock," we're introduced to the major characters at the beginning in a voice-over narrative -- a tactic that's helpful in keeping everybody straight from the start but also a tip-off that we're dealing with a filmmaker who doesn't know how to create characters so they're indelible.

Turkish (Jason Statham, who played Bacon in "Lock, Stock") and Tommy (Stephen Graham) are low-level street toughs -- too likably benign to actually be called crooks -- who set out to make a simple business deal with an Irish drifter named Mickey (Brad Pitt) and end up sponsoring him in a fight put together by Brick Top (Alan Ford), the eminently crooked leader of an underground boxing ring. Previously, Benicio Del Toro's Franky Four Fingers, dressed as a harmless-looking Hasidic Jew, has stolen a giant diamond from some brokers in Antwerp, Belgium. Diamond dealer Cousin Avi (Dennis Farina) hopes to procure it from him, but he knows that Franky is a compulsive gambler and he wants to get the stone before it's gambled away. Meanwhile, a Russian gunrunner named Boris the Blade (Rade Serbedzija) discovers that Franky has the stone and enlists his own gang of ne'er-do-wells to capture it.

Or something like that. Ritchie has piled so many characters into his movie that none of them emerges as distinct, with the exception of a scrappy fighting dog that, after swallowing a chew toy whole, barks with a joyful squeak.

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