19. Snatch (2000)



Roger's Rating :

Should be :


The point of being a movie reviewer is to tell people whether they will enjoy a movie. By this standard Roger's review of Snatch fails miserably. Roger says in his review "Ritchie is a zany, high-energy director. He isn't interested in crime, he's interested in voltage. As an unfolding event, Snatch is fun to watch, even if no reasonable person could hope to understand the plot in one viewing." Roger feels it is too much style with too little substance. He says : "I just want him to get organized, to find the through line, to figure out why we would want to see the movie for more than its technique." Roger only gave this very entertaining movie two stars.
The thing I liked best about this movie was just watching the cartoon like characters and listening to them talk. Turkish, Tommy, Brick Top, Frankie Four Fingers, Boris 'The Blade', Bullet Toot Tony and especially Brad Pitt as Micky O'Neil. It is a little hard to figure out what they are saying and it's even harder keeping track of who is who, but this is a movie that demands repeated viewings and it does get better every time. Sometimes the style of a movie is more important than the plot. The bottom line is : 'Was the movie fun to watch?'.
Sometimes it's just fun to sit back and watch entertaining characters on the screen without worrying about where the plot is going. In that regard this movie has a lot in common with some of the Coen Brothers' movies and also with the Marx Brothers, who Roger mentioned in his review. There wasn't a lot of plot in their stories either, but they were always entertaining. Like Mark Twain said in his preface to Huckleberry Finn : "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." I think he was telling us to just sit back and enjoy it.
On IMDB this movie has an 8.2 rating and is ranked #136 all time. Not too bad for a 2 star movie.

1 comment:

wanderer said...

"The point of being a movie reviewer is to tell people whether they will enjoy a movie. By this standard Roger's review of Snatch fails miserably"

How did he fail miserably when two lines later you quote Ebert as saying it is fun to watch?


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