"Snatch"

A few of the actors are reasonably entertaining: Farina, as a level-headed businessman who's also prone to tempter tantrums, tosses off his performance so casually that it seems light and energetic. Graham is occasionally endearing as Tommy, who's wrapped up in his bumbling cluelessness as much as his Teddy-boy coat.

And Pitt, with his Edwardian cartoon tattoos (his shoulders feature matching cats by early-20th century illustrator Louis Wain, crazy beasts with googly eyes and electrified whiskers) and his intentionally indecipherable brogue (his character is an Irish gypsy), brings a bit of life to the picture, especially in the way he moves. He's nimble, buff and wary, swaggering through the movie like an alley cat with a grudge.

Almost every other character fades from memory shortly after the movie's last frame. (Del Toro's role is so minor it barely registers.) Ritchie does have a knack for using music to enhance certain sequences: In "Lock, Stock," a stripper gyrated to Dusty Springfield's version of "Spooky"; here, Ritchie uses the Specials' "Ghost Town" as a backdrop for a kind of freewheeling urban angst.

But "Snatch" feels so pieced together, so patchy, that the effective parts get swallowed by the meandering whole. Even Ritchie's approach to violence is a little noncommittal, as if he doesn't dare just jump in and get his hands dirty. "Snatch" is plenty violent on its surface -- lots of guns go off and punches are thrown, and one character gets his arm lopped off with the swift stroke of a machete-like knife. But while Ritchie always shows you the action, he doesn't always show its result: We see guns being fired but few bullet holes or plumes of blood; sometimes we don't even see the victims go down.

The approach is incredibly tasteful, as if Ritchie wanted to keep his story a comic book instead of commanding his audience to get jazzed by the gunplay and spurting wounds. There's nothing wrong with that impulse; at its core, it's admirable. But in Ritchie's case it also feels slightly irresponsible -- not morally, but artistically. Most moviegoers have seen plenty of violent movies, so we know what happens when a bullet leaves a gun, and Ritchie seems to be assuming that we don't need to see it again. By allowing so much of the movie's violence to happen outside the frame, he makes the specific actions seem incomplete -- more like a failure of nerve than a conscious choice.

There's something gimmicky about the approach, too. I much prefer the violence of, say, Sam Peckinpah or John Woo to that of Quentin Tarantino, but at least Tarantino makes no secret of how he wants us to get our kicks. Ritchie's violence-by-suggestion is merely coy, and it's one of the things that drain energy from "Snatch."

If we make it to the end, we're rewarded with a small prize, the right to pat ourselves on the back for having made sense of the undulating plot. But the dancers in this elaborate reel have essentially sacrificed themselves to the dips and dives of the plot. The story may be finished, but you have the sense the characters are still out there fumbling about, bedeviled by vague feelings that, dramatically speaking, they've been misused in some way. They're 12 characters in search of an author, one who might actually give them something to do, and they're willing to work cheap.

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