With 2005's Revolver Guy Ritchie Implemented Kabbalah Into His Usual Tiresome Macho Bullshit
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I lost track of Guy Ritchie about a decade and a half ago. 2008’s RocknRolla was the last Ritchie film I endured so in my mind he’s still an impoverished Englishman’s off-brand Quentin Tarantino.
So I am too familiar with the rowdy, profane crime comedy side of Ritchie’s career as well as 2002’s Swept Away, his ill-fated collaboration with then-wife Madonna.
Who could have possibly have envisioned that a Madonna movie would be poorly received? Yet Swept Away was what is known in industry jargon as a “real stinkeroo.”
Ritchie retreated back into the comforting womb of his beloved verbose shoot-em-ups with 2005’s Revolver and 2008’s RocknRolla.
Then Ritchie shocked the world by making a series of non-Tarantinoesque movies that, in a real change of pace, made money and got good reviews.
Ritchie’s comeback began with a two-fisted 2009 adaptation of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. as the cocaine-loving shamus and Jude Law as Watson.
The films that followed weren’t necessarily big hits but they found Ritchie straying regularly from his beloved crime movies with outliers like 2019’s Aladdin.
Back when I worked at a video store in the 1990s customers would sometime see a particularly respected actor appearing in studio schlock and angrily inquire as to what could possibly have led such an auspicious thespian to prostitute their gifts in mercenary garbage.
I would just sigh and think that the answer to that question almost invariably involves a check with a whole lot of zeroes on it. Hollywood behaves the way it does because it exists to make money so it makes the movies that it thinks will achieve that goal most effectively.
It’s been a while since I’ve been a professional film critic so I sometimes find myself thinking like a civilian and asking the very same question that I scoffed at as a teenage Blockbuster clerk.
When I saw a clip of Will Smith, a famously, or rather infamously violent rapper known for his public outbursts of unhinged aggression, goofing his way through “Friend Like Me” in a live-action adaptation of a mildly racist cartoon whose success was overwhelmingly attributable to the manic improvisation of a beloved funnyman who took his own life many years back I found myself thinking, “Jesus Christ. Why on earth would they make garbage like this? It’s so ugly and so terrible and unnecessary. Can’t they just let Aladdin be?”
To snappily answer my own stupid question, which I conveniently already answered, the reason why they made a live-action remake of Aladdin is because there was a fuck-ton of money to be made in doing so.
Aladdin wasn’t just a success at the box-office; it literally made over a billion dollars internationally.
That’s good. That’s quite good. Ritchie was able to leverage the success of movies like Sherlock Holmes and Aladdin to make more of those tongue in cheek action movies that he loves and that the public grudgingly tolerates as long as they’re not 2005’s Revolver.
Ritchie and Madonna both got interested in Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism popular among insufferable celebrities of the time.
The Lock, Stock and the Two Smoking Barrels director very annoyingly set out to make a crime movie informed, in an abstract but very real way, by the filmmaker’s interest in Kabbalah.
Not since John Travolta combined pseudo-religion with some of the worst storytelling known to man-animal in Battlefield Earth has a desire to disseminate religious teaching through the medium of film turned out so poorly.
Revolver immediately establishes a tone of insufferable pretension with not one, not two, not three but four opening quotations, namely:
“The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look”—Julius Caesar
"The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent”—Fundamentals of Chess 1883
“First rule of business; protect your investment”—Etiquette of the Banker, 1775
“There is no avoiding war. It can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy..” Niccolo Machiavelli, 1502
If you aren’t paying attention, possibly because everything is so goddamn boring, don’t worry. Revolver is considerate enough to have its characters repeat those deeply meaningful conceits over and over again for the slow-witted.
It’s a self-consciously “smart”and “deep” and “philosophical” movies that nevertheless never stops explaining itself.
If you, like me, enjoy movies where Statham is
Bald
A man of action who beats the holy living shit out of people, sharks and everyone else who crosses his path
then you are out of luck because in Revolver Statham talks and talks and then he talks some more. He spends so much time vomiting up Ritchie and co-screenwriter Luc Besson’s narration that he doesn’t have time to do all of the things he usually does in action movies that bring great delight to moviegoers everywhere, like be a total badass who gets cranked and transports shit and drives fast and furious all around the world.
Revolver is consequently less an action movie than an inaction movie full of talking and philosophy that wouldn’t impress a fourteen year old.
The movie begins with the ultimate in stasis: Jake Green (Jason Statham with a distractingly, disturbingly full head of hair) spends seven long years in solitary confinement alongside what we are told is a world class flim flam man and a top chess master.
Allowing people in solitary confinement to interact seems to defeat the whole purpose but Revolver is not about “reality” and “verisimilitude” or “plausibility.” It’s about philosophy. It’s a metaphor. Everything in its is pretentious horseshit. You wouldn’t understand, except that its take on philosophy is so asinine and juvenile that it’s easy to grasp.
Being in between a grifter and a chess wiz hips Jake to something called “The Formula”, a device for winning every game that makes him rich as soon as he leaves the big house.
You know how in hack action movies the hero and villain will play a literal game of chess that serves as an insultingly literal representation of the psychological or metaphorical chess match they’re embroiled in?
That happens here. Instead of hitting or kicking people our inaction hero plays chess with Avi (Andre Benjamin), a soft spoken, elegantly dressed career criminal who agrees to protect Jake from vicious mobster Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta) in exchange for his money.
Liotta îs died a Donald Trump orange here and spends a lot of his time onscreen in underwear that highlights his unnatural, carrot colored complexion. I love Liotta but Revolver is like far too many of the films he appeared in: a wannabe action movie that’s nowhere near as smart or tough as it desperately wants to be and strands a great actor in an impossible role. The man was in Wild Hogs, mind you. That film was quite poor. Not John Travolta’s best work!
Ray Liotta IS an Oompah Loompah in Revolver!
Jake learns that he is fatally ill and winds up in a war between Avi and his brusque partner Zach (Vincent Pastore), Dorothy Macha and The Triad. Will he survive this battle? Will anyone else?
Ritchie has never been so desperately in love with his own creative voice. Every line calls attention to itself and its own inflated sense of profundity. Every line consequently calls attention to its emptiness and pretension and delusional sense of its own depth.
Just when it seems like Revolver can’t journey any further up its own posterior it closes with professors, philosophers and also Deepak fucking Chopra discussing the ego and consciousness and other bullshit the film is supposed to be about.
If I understood Kabbalah better I might have enjoyed Revolver more but any dumbass action movie that requires a working knowledge of Jewish mysticism just to not completely suck is beyond redemption. That’s sure how Ritchie’s career felt at this point but he had some tricks up his sleeve that thankfully involved more than recycling Lock, Stock and Smoking Barrels’ crime world shenanigans to rapidly dwindling returns.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace