Review of RocknRolla (2008) by Dan M — 21 Jan 2012

Fellas, it's a Warner Bros. gangster film with rock-scored beatings, foot chases and gun play, exploding cars, informants, getting hit with baseball bats, shirtless men with guns, sophisticated muggings, throwaway slapstick gags, nightclubs, faked deaths, a child with a gun,bags over guys' heads, an almost comical lack of emotion on anyone's part, a seductive double-dealing businesswoman, and art theft. Tom Wilkinson hams it up as a slimy crime boss. Its pivotal character, for whose vendetta we root, is a crackhead rock star, the step-son of the mob. There is the prospect of a trilogy. I now ask any teenage guy reading this, ones who've seen it and ones who've not: Do you love this movie? Of course you do.

What essentially is RocknRolla about? It's not about gangsters. It's not about the music industry. It's not about revenge, money or real estate, all of which play a role in Guy Ritchie's signature multi-strand clockwork plot. RocknRolla is about men, young, dumb, full of come, loaded for bear, big and brutish, lithe and agile, tough and weak, dead or alive. Why else would Ritchie include such a dose of screen time concerning one of hired crook Gerard Butler's close friend being gay? Butler overreacts, undergoes homosexual panic, realizes everyone else but him knows, endures a slow dance with his gay pal to console him on a bad night, and eventually benefits from his being into guys because he seduces a gay lawyer to gain the identity of an informant. If you are gay, you probably won't be offended. Really, it's just a bunch of guys, clearly obsessed with their masculinity, accepting their friend for who he is by exchanging gay jokes and wisecracks with each other. This gay character is no less masculine than the rest of these quintessential cocksmen, as he is part of the "Wild Bunch," Butler's crew of thieves.

Can we safely call Guy Ritchie a one-trick pony at this point? Yes. By and large, he fundamentally makes one movie, and when he tried to make another kind of movie, he and his fans suffered great anguish and submerged the memory. But for those of us who had the privilege of seeing his wickedly disdained previous movie, Revolver, considering Ritchie's range, he is making a much different movie this time around. Revolver is an outlandishly intricate brain-buster so vast in its depth and detail that it is difficult to get one's entire mind around it. RocknRolla is a celebration of the penis, testicles and chest hair. That's it.

My favorite character I've already mentioned, a crackhead mob-raised rock star named Johnny Quid, played by the interesting Toby Kebbell. When I say he's my favorite character, I don't mean that he has many dimensions, or I identify with him. Each of the twenty or thirty main characters is about as deep as what face value suggests. He just so happens to have the most interesting face value of them all. Guy Ritchie's penchant for superficial screen writing is back with a vengeance, having even less to say than he did with his first two gangster pictures. What carries the film is its stylistic charisma, which is the aspect of his movies that grows and grows.

Thandie Newton's character, essentially the only woman in the film, is a sexy seductress, married for convenience, opportunistically playing both ends and having sex with Gerard Butler, a hilarious piece of editing by the way, for no apparent reason. This is how women are normally used in films like this, even high-brow gangster films by Scorsese or Coppolla. Pertaining to those two filmmakers, one could easily argue that their films about the mob are realistic accounts of the environment and historical hierarchy of organized crime, and that women are objectified in that world. Guy Ritchie has no interest in depicting a realistic underworld. He never has. At one point, for instance, two Russian war criminals dance around a room in their underwear sharpening knives and blaring rock music in ritualistic anticipation for their butchering of a character. So why objectify the only female character? Because this film has an unapologetically obvious target audience: Horny, testosterone- driven heterosexual teenage guys.

Perhaps as I grow past the age of 20, I will be less and less enthralled in movies like RocknRolla, but for now, I accept no guilt in enjoying its shameless fantasy world of dick- swinging, black-suited, heat-packing street guys.