Snatch Me If You Can

Before he was making big blockbusters like the Sherlock Holmes movies and that new King Arthur film that just opened this weekend (the latter feature is why I'm covering the subject of this review today), Guy Ritchie was a bloke from England looking to make crime movies with a distinct air to them. He's carried over his unique editing and directing sensibilities over to some of his blockbuster work, but if you want pure unfiltered Guy Ritchie, you can most certainly find it in his 2000 crime movie Snatch, which is packed to the gills with energy as well as characters in its gargantuan ensemble cast.

The premise of Snatch is a little hard to pack into a conventional one or two paragraph long summary, mostly because there's so much going on and so many different characters with conflicting agendas, But primarily, the plot revolves around Turkish (Jason Statham, who has hair on top of his head in this role, a strange sight to see!) and Tommy (Stephen Graham) trying to appease a big crime boss, Brick Top (Alan Ford) by way of a boxing match, one that has Turkish and Tommy setting up Mickey O'Neil (Brad Pitt) as the man who will fight in the ring. Meanwhile, two guys, Sol (Lennie Jones) and Vinny (Robbie Gee) get on the bad side of Brick Top after sticking up a bookie while a missing diamond connects these two plotlines and a couple others running throughout the movie.

The main distinguishing factor separate Snatch from other crime movies is just how fully animated it is. Combine a sugar-riddled kid in a Six Flags parking lot with a fratboy who's just consumed a dozen Red Bulls and you have a pretty good perception of just how frenetic Snatch is as a movie, this thing just bounces back and forth between individual plotlines at a whirlwind pace. The editing by Jon Harris is responsible for a lot of this, with even seemingly simple cuts to other shots continuing the movies overall vibrant atmosphere. Any aspect of Snatch is a chance to toss another helping of exuberance onto the audience.

That's both a good and bad thing, at least for me. There is a lot of fun to be had in just how giddily Snatch dishes out new obstacles or storytelling twists and turns for the characters to grapple with, there's really no telling just what may be around the corner for these various characters. But it also has the disadvantage of making Snatch feel like it's running all over the place in order to distract you from how disjointed the plot structure can be as well as how thin a number of the characters are. That latter element really hurts it, since the one-note caricatures that comprise almost the entirety of the movie are basically it in terms of depth for the various members of the cast and few of them ere even the fun kind of simplified archetypes.

For instance, there's a heavier set fellow named Tyrone in the movie and the main joke is....he's heavier set. That's kind of it. Brad Pitt's character talks in an unorthodox accent so....that's all he gets for his character too (though Pitt does get to be at the center of the movies most fun surprise plot point in the climax, to be fair). There's a similar level of one-note caricatures running throughout the majority of the cast that just aren't fun enough to justify their shallow nature. Statham and Graham at least have a fun dynamic as the two lead characters while Benicio Del Toro is similarly solid in his all too limited screentime.

While Ritchie's screenplay has some pretty thinly written characters, at least he pens some fun dialogue for the various individuals in the story to exchange while as a director, Ritchie seems to handle the larger in size cast in a decent enough fashion. What he's created with Snatch is really a mostly serviceable crime caper that really needed as much personality in the forgettable characters to match the idiosyncratic rapid-fire editing. I do think I prefer the first Sherlock Holmes movie (though not the more poorly paced sequel) Guy Ritchie would go on to make in his career to the more flawed but occasionally fun Snatch.