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Guy forks up
another gunpowder plot 
06 Sept 2008- You can sneer at Ritchie's mockney heritage. You can even
ridicule his missus. But on the evidence of RocknRolla, you cannot deny that as
a full-throttle film-maker he is hard to beat for sheer energy.
Take the opening scene, in which
the junkie rock star Johnny Quid (Kebbell, above) is introduced via a rapid-fire
montage of sex, drugs and the rest. No, take the subsequent scene, equally
woozy, where our hero, One Two (Butler) is introduced up to his neck in a dodgy
property scam involving East End legend Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), a Russian
oligarch called Uri (Karel Roden) and Uri's crooked accountant, Stella (Newton).
No, scrap that, take the later
scene in which One Two is chased by Uri's henchmen. But what about the scene in
which Quid kills a bouncer with just two pencils? Or the warehouse climax? In
fact, almost every set-piece in RocknRolla is as noisy and brash as the crassly
abbreviated title suggests. There is, typically, and perhaps mercifully, little
time for reflection here. The film, Ritchie's best work since Snatch, is almost
pure momentum, sprinkled with trademark mockney dialogue: “There's no school
like the old school, and Lenny's the headmaster!”
Elsewhere, it's curiously
homophobic - there are loads of gay jokes, “poofter” digs and gay sex jibes. It
is so gay-obsessed (One Two is even tricked into, gasp, a gay experience) that
it seems to be demanding a liberation of the homosexual component in
heterosexual men. The music, meanwhile, is a sensory blitzkrieg of everyone from
the Clash to the Hives.
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