RocknRolla: Critic Reviews

Ritchie concocts a crime-jungle demimonde that's organically linked to the real world, and it's a damn fun one to visit.

The violence is idiotic and brutal (the story is just idiotic), but it's also so noncommittal that it doesn't offend. Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose.

I mean, Mr Ritchie: this genra: it's ova. I mean, doing yet anotha stinka of a drama about the mee-lee-a of the ersatz London gangsta? You're taking the piss - intcha?

RocknRolla is a well-acted and attitudinal action movie, a return to Ritchie's trademark 'Mockney' style, which takes amusing and twisted turns.

Style is what RocknRolla is all about. And it has it in spades, from the cockney Pulp Fiction dialogue to the music-video editing of the rambling narrative.

This is the first of his cartoons to work better as a movie than as a fashion spread.

What do you have to do to get your career revoked in England, short of being Gary Glitter?

The actual plot is so uselessly convoluted you'd get a headache just reading it -- but you might want to pull out the Advil anyway, given Ritchie's reliance on flashy editing, a blasting soundtrack and fetishized gunplay.

A handsome ensemble of blokes and one high-heeled accountant who propel this slam-bang romp about the collision of criminal styles in the age of globalization and real estate speculation.

If RocknRolla clings to the company of ne'er-do-wells, it's not because they bristle with the frustrations of society, but purely because Ritchie wants to borrow their cheeky charm -- a virtue that, in reality, none of them possess.

RocknRolla isn't as jammed with visual pyrotechnics as Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Smoking Barrel (1998), but that's OK, because with anything more happening, the movie could induce motion sickness.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

For all its hipster posturing, fast cutting, and camera tricks, this tale of chicanery is peculiarly arid and brittle, without a single character worth caring about.

It's a sad experience to watch RocknRolla, the obituary for the Guy Ritchie brand of English gangster flicks.

Flashy but assured, the film is a controlled exercise in style that toes the line but never feels over-the-top. In a word, RocknRolla rocks.

RocknRolla, though not the most original movie ever made, is a blast, an adrenaline rush of punked-out rock-and-roll-fueled action and crime.

Guy Ritchie bounces back to top form with RocknRolla, a cleverly constructed, sensationally stylish and often darkly hilarious seriocomic caper.

A sharp comedy as well as a punk-pulp spree.

RocknRolla reminds us of how cool Ritchie was before Madonna doused his fire. Pity he makes us wait so long.

Sometimes it amounts to a laugh or two.

If, as his critics contend, Ritchie is just making the same movie over and over again, at least he's getting better at it.

It's like a lumpy, overworked, useless 'objet' that someone who doesn't know you very well might give you as a gift, a thing that sits around the house serving no unearthly purpose other than reminding you, none too subtly, that it's completely hollow.