[snatch] up there with the best

The thing about Guy Ritchie's Snatch which will keep it off many people's Top 100 list is:

1] Its gruesome and street-focused subject matter, certainly not elevated in the manner of Schindler's List or timeless in the manner of Gone with the Wind;

2] It's uncompromising dialogue which, even for a Brit, is hard to follow at times, let alone for an American.

And yet, as a piece of film making, it is right up there with the best. I've seen Citizen Kane and the Third Man, which were required viewing at Drama and AV lessons and they rightly occupy their place but I think this film has something I can't quite define.

So, rather than define it, I'll ape Ritchie's own technique and throw in a potpourri of comment which somehow gives a whole by the end:

It may turn out that British maverick filmmaker Guy Ritchie has only the taste and talent to make one kind of film - but, if every salvo he fires is as snappy, funny, and energized as his initial two movies, does that kind of limitation really matter? After all, not every director has to be like Martin Scorsese and dabble in costume dramas and would-be epics about religious figures. [James Berardinelli]

Ritchie is a zany, high-energy director. He isn't interested in crime, he's interested in voltage. As an unfolding event, "Snatch" is fun to watch, even if no reasonable person could hope to understand the plot in one viewing. [Roger Ebert]

Aside from two or three, ridiculous coincidences (which are beautifully realized on film, btw), the progressions are sometimes violent, always gritty, and most often starkly funny. [Ross Anthony]

Snatch is constantly freeze-framing, jump-cutting, under-cranking and even turning the camera upside down--but for no discernible reason. It's just swinging-dick showoff filmmaking that blatantly ignores the needs of story and character in favor of whatever happens to look "cool" at the moment. [Sean Burns]

Everything in this movie is either a flashback or a flash-forward to a flashback that has a flash sideways right out of the realm of giving a damn. [Erik Childress]

Ritchie spices the picture tastefully and artfully with fast speed, quick zooms, and rush cuts that add to the humor and intensity. [Ross Anthony]

Snatch is raucous and crude, but never boring or predictable. It is bold, brash, and cartoonish, and never takes itself seriously. In interviews, Ritchie has claimed not to have been influenced by Tarantino, but the video clerk-cum-filmmaker's trademarks are littered around Snatch's colorful landscape (both in terms of technique and plot contortions). [James Berardinelli]

For Guy Ritchie, the style is the substance; it's the whole reason for the movie to exist, the whole reason for making it, and the whole reason for seeing it. The character work is nonexistent, there's no thematic material to speak of, and the plot is ludicrously complex. [Shay Casey]

Everything is left to the imagination, teasing the audience, which may actually be a worse sin than allowing us to witness whatever brutal carnage a filmmaker can come up with since the human psyche is capable of the unspeakable. [Erik Childress]

There is one addition of considerable wit: In the previous film, some of the accents were impenetrable to non-British audiences, so this time, in the spirit of fair play, Ritchie has added a character played by Brad Pitt, who speaks a gypsy dialect even the other characters in the movie can't understand. [Roger Ebert]

Highlights?

The "Brad Pitt taking a hit in slow mo" scene is one of the sweetest boxing sequences I've ever witnessed on film, going the extra surreal mile to clinch a place in silver screen history. [Ross Anthony]

For me, the classic sequence was the car with the boxing promoters discussing the history of milk and the throwing of the carton out of the window, the thugs in the Jag discussing the diamond and then crashing when milk sprays across their windscreen, the Russian thereby escaping from the trunk of the car, only to be hit by the black pawnbrokers in the stolen vehicle.

And to make it doubly classic, it wasn't shown in chronological order.

And you can't go past the monologue by Vinny Jones in the pub, using high-falutin vocabulary you'd never in a thousand years expect to hear from an ex-member of the Crazy Gang and one time visitor to Gladiators.

Also, Pitt can act. The boy can certainly act.

Also, also, one of my favourite but unsung actors is Mike Reid [Doug the Head] and in his little dialogue with Benicio Del Toro, it's the little chuckle he gives at the end which shows the man's class.

In the end, the film is fun and a triumph of filmmaking technique. That's it. You'd go to the cinema for the entertainment value. What's cinema for, in your opinion?