RocknRolla

As one has come to expect from a Guy Ritchie picture, RocknRolla has been suffused with tough-guy dialogue, larger-than-life performances, and a convoluted storyline that often borders on incoherent. Yet it’s hard to deny that the film is often very entertaining and consistently engaging, as Ritchie’s penchant for incredibly brisk pacing and gleefully over-the-top visuals essentially propels the proceedings from start to finish. This is despite a storyline, which revolves around a missing painting and the seedy underworld types affected by its disappearance (including Gerard Butler’s One Two, Tom Wilkinson’s Lenny, and Tom Hardy’s Handsome Bob), that often seems just a little too frenetic for its own good, with the myriad of characters and plot threads essentially demanding one’s full and complete attention for the duration of the film’s admittedly overlong running time. And while Ritchie does keep the violence quotient fairly low, there’s little doubt that the movie’s few action-oriented sequences are nothing short of astounding in their effectiveness (eg a scene in which One Two and his cronies must escape a pair of unusually tenacious Russian mobsters). It’s consequently easy enough to overlook the fact that RocknRolla does start to run out of steam towards the end, and one ultimately can’t help but hope that Ritchie delivers the sequel promised in the film’s closing moments.

*** out of ****