Snatch: Critic Reviews

This may be one of the hazardous offshoots of the music-video-trained generation of moviemakers; they confuse a diet of eye candy with a full meal.

Ritchie may be skilled at generating controlled chaos, but his surprise-a-minute strategy ultimately holds no surprises.

Manages the trick of keeping the viewer entertained -- and aware of exactly who is where -- even when the movie is going in three directions at the same time.

Bouncing around in a world of bare-knuckle boxing, gypsy swindlers, pretend Jewish diamond merchants, indestructible Russian assassins and a thug who disposes of bodies by feeding them to hungry pigs, Snatch has enough plots for a fair-sized cemetery.

It takes a very clever schoolboy to make a movie as elaborately empty as Guy Ritchie's Snatch.

The story motors like a car driven by a chatty maniac who somehow stays on the road.

He's not breaking new ground with Snatch, merely fine-tuning the knack for disreputable kicks he showed in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Eccentric characters, lively banter, adults only.

Of the ensemble, only Pitt truly shows his class, delivering an amusing yet emotive performance amongst a group of actors who -- at best -- are pandering to laddish culture.

It's a twisting, witty, and wise crime-boxing story about the hunt for a huge diamond and a prizefighter who can't take a fall.

Ritchie's follow-up to Lock, Stock is an even more craftily concocted underworld entertainment, helped no end by the casting of Pitt as the bare-knuckle boxer Mickey.

...an ideal follow-up to writer/director Guy Ritchie's debut effort, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Snatch is a full-throttle comedic crime caper that more than resembles Lock, Stock... yet remains a rollicking good time in its own right.

Madonna's husband is a dervish in the editing room, and he's not ashamed to have nicked most of the conventions of American noir.

Fortunately, the drop in entertainment value from one Ritchie film to the next isn't as steep as the drop in originality.

It's rather like the favorite pastime of this movie's villain ... throwing wild dogs into a pit and watching them fight until there's only one left standing.

This is a swift, sharp picture that pleases the senses on all levels, ranging from the visual to the aural, the linguistic, and yes even the intellectual.

There's just not a lot of fun to be had here. The plot is too convoluted, too filled with double-reversals and twists for us to turn our brains off, relax and watch Guy Ritchie's kinetic visual style.

Snatch, while somewhat hard to follow, represents a fascinating study in character interaction and complex plot development.

What we have here is a gaudy mess. At times it feels like it's being made up as it goes along.

Writer-director Guy Ritchie might as well have added subtitles saying, 'Take that, Quentin Tarantino!'

All the Tarantino trademarks, basically, except that it's not nearly as enjoyable, inventive or clever.

Ritchie's command of the visual medium is so skillful, his criminals so memorable and his writing so undeniably entertaining, that it's a wasted criticism to try and intellectually dissect [his] movies.

A twisty, fun and high energy, if not particularly groundbreaking... de facto sequel to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Most of the people we meet have names like Boris the Blade, Gorgeous George or Doug the Head; as you might suspect, none of them are likely to be found taking high tea at Harrods.