It’s not easy to break out of a box you’ve put yourself in, but after Guy Ritchie’s third film – Madonna/Ritchie vanity project Swept Away – smashed against the critical and commercial rocks, it seemed that a quick return to the Mockney world that made his name would be a wise move to make. However, like many filmmakers who wish to expand their horizons, Richie understandably didn’t just want to make the same old stuff, so with 2005’s Revolver he tried a heist so sneaky, it could have come one of the wide boys from his earlier films.
The result is a movie that’s taken something of a kicking over the last few years and was so derided upon its release, it not only spurred Richie to go fully back to comedy/gangster land with 2008’s RocknRolla, but it even got an extended US cut a couple of years later just to explain its more fluid concepts. Yes, there’s geezers and guns, but there’s also a healthy dose of metaphysics and themes of Kabbalah all over the place – but years after it’s release, is Revolver a misunderstood masterpiece, or is it (in rhyming slang terms) still just pony?
Confidence trickster Jake Green emerges from prison where he’s spent seven long years in solitary with a mind to chisel away at the crime empire of the volatile, casino owning gang boss, Dorothy Macha – the man who ostensibly put him there. In the next two years, Green manages to secure rather a hefty amount of wealth and when he’s secures enough, he walks into his enemy’s casino to make a bet with the man himself. Winning an obscene amount on a coin toss and essentially humiliating Macha on his own turf, the enraged gangster wants Jake killed, but unbeknownst to him, our Mr. Green has himself a couple of protectors.
These aren’t your usual protectors, of course. In fact, you could describe the strange pairing of Zach and Avi as borderline abusive, but after they predict that Jake has a serious blood disorder that will kill him in three days and they save his life from a attempt by Macha’s number one hitman, Sorter, he finds himself indebted to them. However, in exchange for their continued protection from Macha, Jake has to give them all his ill-gotten gains and do whatever they say without question, which proves tougher than you’d think when the pair starts using his cash in a complex loan sharking enterprise that seems weirdly like a violent pyramid scheme.
But all the while, Jake can’t help but ponder the obvious: is the con man actually getting conned? As Zach and Avi schemes get ever more strange and starts to directly affect Macha’s operations and his deals with the mysterious and unseen crime lord Mr. Gold, the pair seem to be pushing the raging gangster into a gang war with Triad kingpin, Lord John. But a more existential war seems to be raging within Jake as the strange occurrences that’s unfolded over the last few day seem to be pointing to something of an explanation that’s metaphysical in nature.
On the record, I can’t help but admire Guy Ritchie for trying something that was so obviously going to enrage his fan base. I can just imagine someone who lapped up the zippy, sparky, comedy shenanigans of the likes of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch being utterly repelled by the weighty, existential themes that Revolver finds itself mulling over inbetween the quick fire editing and each throaty wisecrack that comes from a bewigged Jason Statham. I’m a big believer in the fact that filmmakers need to make their movies first for themselves and then hopes that audiences take to it upon release, but while I’ll happily defend Ritchie’s vision all day long, I’ll also concede that at this point in his career, he just wasn’t dexterous enough of a filmmaker to pull it off.
In fact, the only parts of Revolver that manage to really hit the mark are the moments where the film lurches of either one of two extremes. Whenever the director indulges fully in the quirky, tricksy, gangster fuckery we expect from him, we can see that the “old” Ritchie is still very much present. A moment when Ray Liotta’s Macha is pinned down by his own bodyguards after a botched hit sees him directly in the first line of his dying, armed, would-be assassin who still tries to take clumsy hotshots at her target is sublime and a later action sequence involving Mark Strong’s stuttering hitman brings all the twitchy cutting and funky music choices that we’ve come to expect.
But on the flip side, when Revolver really pushes the more overtly head-trippy sequences that tackle the larger, more spiritual themes in play, it hits some sort of bizarre, hallucinogenic sweet spot that gets you to almost broach what Ritchie is trying to say. The scene that has Statham’s Green arguing with his own ego in a lift in order to reach a new level of spiritual understanding is some trippy Golluming of the highest order and the subsequent sequence that sees Macha thrown into having a near breakdown by Jake’s newly obtained peace and inner serenity (while wearing nothing but tiny pants) gives us a tremendous bit of counter intuitive acting by the late, great Ray Liotta.
However, it’s the scenes that fall somewhere between the two that trips things up. While Statham does an acceptable job from under some distractingly greasy locks, again, the fact that the actor was becoming more renowned for his action output probably once again put out a misleading message to fans as to what the movie was actually about. But the real issue here is that Ritchie obviously thinks he’s got the directorial goods to pull off a confounding puzzle box of a crime epic – however, too often he veers between overexplaining to the point of confusion and just being vague for values sake and while other movies that stealthily drop large spiritual themes on us in popular entertainment remember to be beguiling enough for us to want to take a closer look (The Matrix, for example), Revolver is nowhere near, funny, intriguing or exciting enough for us to want to do the same.
However, in one of the film’s great ironies, while Ritchie’s talents as a filmmaker weren’t quite honed enough to pull this Kabbalah influenced crime film off back in 2005, I also believe that he simply wouldn’t have the nerve to make something so daring and risky today, which leaves the film in a somewhat strange state of limbo.
Do I feel a sense of admiration that Ritchie followed up a notorious flop with such something so commercially risky? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean I particularly like how he tried to pull it off and when it comes to a man trying to put his own interests and beliefs into a genre that often cherishes bloody noses over existential musings metaphysical twists, there an ironic sense that the trickster has gone and conned himself.
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