REEL Review: ROCKnROLLA
October 9th, 2008
By Allan Tong, of Holy Grails
Guy Ritchie returns with another highly stylized gangster-comedy about East End hoods killing each other as they search for the MacGuffin. That’s what Hitchcock called the prize that all the characters in a movie chase. It doesn’t matter what the MacGuffin really is, as long as it sparks the action.
In ROCKnROLLA, the MacGuffin is the world’s most beautiful painting that shady Russian land developer Uri (Karel Roden) offers to shadier East End kingpin, Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) as a good luck charm. Uri and Lenny are unlikely partners in a crooked multi-million-pound land deal in (recently) booming London. Representing the new class of foreign mafia, Uri has the money while old-school Lenny has the bureaucrats.
Throwing a wrench in the works are smalltime crook, One Two (Gerard Butler) who robs Lenny before his men can pay Uri, Stella (Thandie Newton) who is Lenny’s smart, sexy lover, and Johnny (Toby Kebbell), Lenny’s estranged junkie rock star stepson who nicks the painting to avenge his abusive stepfather.
As the painting changes hands, the characters swirl around each other like a hurricane. There’s a nasty interrogation scene involving shellfish, a chase sequence between One Two’s crew and Uri’s that would make Rasputin proud, and Stella manipulating every man she meets with her svelte frame, brains and beauty.
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