| Overall Grade: |
D+ |
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| Story: |
C- |
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| Acting: |
C+ |
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| Direction: |
D+ |
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| Visuals: |
B |
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Too clever for its own good
by Jon (movies profile)
Apr 24, 2008
1
of
1 people found this review helpful
Revolver is another in an endless line of movies which are quite frankly too clever for their own good. It immediately brings to mind other “clever” movies such as Thank You for Smoking, The Manchurian Candidate, and Hide and Seek. These types of films attempt to pull a bit of cinematic sleight of hand on the viewer, and sometimes it works. More often than not, however, you get a mess like Revolver.
The cast does its best here, but director Guy Ritchie doesn’t make it easy. Ritchie must now be considered a serious challenger to George Lucas for the ability to make otherwise capable actors sound like complete buffoons. The dialog is absolutely terrible at best and actually physically painful at its worst. Statham manages best with his schizophrenic dialog, but Ray Liotta looks like a kid in a grade-school stage production trying to enunciate lines from a script written in old English.
The plot is nonexistent; rather, the audience is presented with a kind of thumbnail character sketch of Jake (Statham) onto which a variety of scenes (most of them flash-forwards, flash-backs, and alternate realities) are tacked. This method fails completely, and by the middle of the film, the audience pretty much knows that there is no hope for redemption whatsoever.
The film is at least consistent, for audience expectations are satisfied with the sophomoric ending, which I could explain here in great detail without giving anything at all away. The film is simply just that convoluted.
Revolver isn’t a mindbender, a thriller, or a thought-provoking work of art. It is simply 90 minutes of garbage thrown onto celluloid in seemingly random order with random bits of folk wisdom thrown in for good measure. The end credits, featuring various psychologists and psychiatrists explaining the nature of the ego is icing on the cake.
There is probably a reason Revolver took so long to make US release. I imagine that responsible filmmakers in the UK were hoping that Guy Richie would die of a brain aneurism trying to explain the film to US distributors. Watch on DVD at your own peril. |
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