No matter how much you love violence, you are still a sick bastard. True, the chickens may never fly, but a tuxedo will always make you one fine looking, hot mama . I am spouting nonsense…. But its entertaining nonsense… and you are still reading aren’t you? You now know what it is like to see Snatch, a Mr. Madonna (Guy Ritchie) film.

Yep, Snatch is nonsense, pointless, meaningless nonsense. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Snatch is filled with a bunch of heartless, corrupt, criminal idiots all bent on either killing each other for a big payoff or as a means of survival. Its survival instincts at its lowest and its damn funny.

Snatch is everything a dark comedy should be, insidious, twisted, and maniacal. And somewhere in the midst of all that death, murder, and decay, you throw in a few things that just don’t fit. A Russian who just won’t die, a man with four fingers, a dog who swallows a squeaky toy. You see, Snatch is a list. A list of weird ass characters, which are checked off throughout the film and thrown into a variety of bad decisions and even worse choices.

There is no agenda to Snatch. There is no one pervasive plot. Just a series of small and petty plots which careen their way through the film and ultimately crash together where only one storyline survives and the others end in a pool of blood. Ritchie is certainly a creative filmmaker. Camera angles, character development, all thrown together in a glorious mishmash of confusing and sick fun. Yet, in spite of all this confusing mindless fun, Snatch is not quite a great film. If it were a bomb being dropped on New York, it would probably end up wiping out most of New Jersey. Because just at the moments when Snatch borders on greatness, Ritchie blows it. Most often through lumbering and tedious dialogue following a particular sharp edged and funny exchange by a minor and soon to be ex-living character. Some lines fly high on the sharp tongue and wit of a master linguistic stroke, only to be knocked flat by a clod of dialogue mud.

The most obvious symptom of dialogue slushiness is evident in Snatch’s overuse of the word “fuck”. Now one expects gangsters and lowlifes to use large quantities of profanity. So it’s not its use that is quite so tedious. Rather, it’s its use to the exclusion of all other curse words that is so befuddling. Not once in the entire film is any curse word used besides “fuck.” And not only is it the only word used, it is overused. Every sentence contains at least one of these beauties. At first it’s funny. Then its just background noise, and eventually its just damn distracting. Its symptomatic of a bigger dialogue problem… which is that quite often Ritchie has forgotten to give his characters something to say between one stretch of scathing, burning, funny dialogue and another, and is simply looking for filler.

Snatch will not be the best movie of the year, but it’s a start if you have the stomach for a good vicious psychotic comedy. See Snatch and keep your head down.

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