Snatch

Despite the suggestiveness of its title, Snatch is all but devoid of women. Written and directed by England's Guy Ritchie, who emptied Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on us a couple of years ago, it's a man's man of a movie. No, that's not right, it's a boys-will-be-boys movie that revels in the myriad forms of violence available to the modern brute: guns, knives, machetes, car bumpers, car doors, car windows and, last but certainly not least, fists. There are Russian gangsters, Irish gypsies and enough Cockney slang to baffle American viewers for years to come. The names alone, which seem dreamed up by Damon Runyon, Chester Gould or Vince McMahon, have a pulpish poetry all their own: Franky Four Fingers, Boris the Blade, Bullet Tooth Tony. And the faces! With mugs like these, you could open your own dog pound. Speaking of which, a gem-swallowing pooch figures prominently in Ritchie's plot, which passes an 84-carat diamond among various members of the London underworld, each more colorfully lethal than the one before. (My personal favorite: Alan Ford's Brick Top, who offers a disquisition on how to dispose of a body while leading a tour of his pig farm.) A guy named Turkish (Jason Statham) narrates, not that he makes the movie any easier to follow. Hoping to move up in the world of bare-knuckle boxing promotion, Turkish secures the services of One Punch Mickey (Brad Pitt), who can put an opponent to sleep with a single blow. The thing is, Mickey's supposed to throw the fight, not win it, a detail that, along with everything else, seems lost on him. Before you know it, Turkish and his hapless sidekick, Tommy (Stephen Graham), are off to the pig farm. That's only one gear of Ritchie's farcical plot, which works like a Swiss clock. As for Ritchie's camerawork, it's a veritable three-ring circus of freeze-frames, jump-cuts and split-screens. The movie does wear you down after a while, so relentlessly madcap its mise-en-scÃne. And the whole thing seems so...male. After Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ritchie was appointed the British Ambassador of Laddism, a loosely organized movement that sees life as one brawl after another, after which you retire to the local pub to have a pint with the lads. Then Ritchie performed the ultimate lad gesture: He married Madonna. Whatever his motives, he knows how to get what he wants, including a deftly comic performance out of Pitt, whose character sports an accent so thick even he doesn't know what the hell he's saying half the time.