I’ve often said that a movie should be judged on the basis of how well it achieves what it set out to do. You can’t use the same perspective to review popcorn flicks as you do art house films, because it simply doesn’t add up; it’s downright silly to attempt to critique the latest Schwarzenegger vehicle with the same standards as a new Scorsese film. If a movie sets out to entertain and make you forget your troubles for two hours, and does just that, then it is a good film - end of story. Snatch is a perfect example that kind of movie, one that harbors no loftier ambitions than to simply show you a rocking good time. No lessons, no morals, no higher purpose. Just fun.

This is the second film director Guy Ritchie has made, his first being Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a complex caper comedy set in the British underground, featuring colorfully-named thieves and assorted other lowlifes that happen to cross paths in their quest for money. Snatch is essentially a reworking, only with more action and tense pacing, funnier dialog, better performances and an overall more polished story. Lock, Stock was a very good film, but Snatch qualifies as a work of art.

Well, to some, anyway. Many people, including rabid fans of Ritchie’s previous outing, have leveled some harsh, and quite unjustified, criticisms against his new film. They claim that it’s nothing but a rehash of his debut, and that Ritchie is just trying to recapture the same success that he saw with Lock, Stock, pulling a con on the American public. This, needless to say, is not so. Sure, Snatch is strikingly similar to its predecessor (like I said, a reworking), and the story does revolve around a collection of brain-dead criminals after the same goal (as one character notes, “Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity”), but the emulation ends there. Saying that this film is a remake, and that Ritchie is nothing more than a hack would be like attacking Woody Allen for making nothing but neurotic comedies (if you were to suggest to these same people that Manhattan is a rip-off of Annie Hall, they’d turn more vicious than any of the two-bit goons in Snatch).

Many have also said that the plot is needlessly convoluted, and that Ritchie is after personal kicks as opposed to coherence. Again, this is ridiculous; anyone with a decent attention span and at least a mild understanding of English accents should have no trouble following the action (even Brad Pitt’s notorious performance as a mumbling Irish gypsy is easy to decipher if you listen hard enough). I won’t go into plot details here, partially because doing so would require more space than the rest of this review, but also because discovering the finer points of the pretzel-like narrative is one of the film’s chief pleasures. I hate to use the cliché, but Snatch is indeed like a roller coaster - fast and furious, with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. And by the end, it leaves you feeling positively giddy.

*Originally published in the January 27, 2001 edition of the Lodi News-Sentinel

Copyright 2001 Jason Wallis