Well its better then Swept Away at least. Guy Ritchie runs back to his bread and butter, the instantly forgettable, schizophrenically shot mockney crime movie and self-concsiously masculine men cheer everywhere. To be fair, Ritchie is and always has been an accomplished director and can do superficially flash up there with the best of them, but the problem is his scripts which are without exception awful. A man who exposes the world to lines like ' in there like swimwear' should not be allowed to own a pencil, pen or any other writing apparatus. Ironically this is one if the best ensemble british casts this side of a Harry Potter movie. We've got Oscar nominated Tom Wilkinson, bafta winning Thandie Newton, Leonidas from 300, and several lesser known high quality British character actors like Idris Elba, Toby Kebbell, Mark Strong and Tom Hardy (Who's come a long way since Star Trek: Nemesis). And what does Ritchie do, well naturally he pretty much wastes them all. Elba gets about 5 lines, Strong valiantly deals with an awfully written voice over and awful occasionally rhyming dialogue, Newton, a much more talented actress then she's usually allowed to show, essentially is allowed to stand their and look hot. Which she is great at in fairness. Butler is a charming lead, and there is definately something leading man about him, but his character is abandoned in the final third for Kebbell's junkie rock star. Kebbell is great, and will hopefully secure some better roles on the back of this. But what hampers all these actors is Ritchie the writer's ADD habit of jumping to what he likes in the moment and abandoning all coherence for the sake of a cool scene. He has always done this, and this is probably why he is popular with audiences, but it is something that gets me all riled up. The day he starts directing other people's scripts is a day I'll give him a second chance, but until then he'll just keep rolling out conveyor belt mediocrity like this.
5/10
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