The TV Addict 

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.

Not an exceptional writer, Ritchie excels in his visuals which are rooted in his rock video background. Cinematographer David Higgs presents a desaturated London, drained of colour, which helps to ground the film when it threatens to get silly. ROCKnROLLA is as fast-paced as Ritchie’s other productions, but here the overall tone is more relaxed. In the writing department Ritchie is at least more patient with his characters, particularly a hilarious subplot revolving around One Two who can’t admit he’s gay (possibly influenced by Ritchie’s wife) and a party scene where Stella passes information to One Two as they dance to loud music which is smart and funny. True, Ritchie’s characters remain one-dimensional, and Stella would be invisible if it weren’t for Thandie Newton’s strong performance. However, his characters are more sympathetic and smarter than usual something that can’t be said for the crew in LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

ROCKnROLLA almost loses its audience in the first 20 minutes as it introduces a string of characters and subplots, and threatens to veer off-course halfway through. However, the last act ties up all the disparate threads into a satisfying climax. The casual violence mixed with laughs still troubles me, but there’s less brutality here and more suggestion which works better and helps me say that Guy Ritchie has returned to form with ROCKnROLLA.

Overall rating: 4 out of 5 REELs