London Crawling

GUY RITCHIE PULLS ANOTHER CAPER WITHSNATCH

his new film, Snatch, the director Guy Ritchie has essentially remade his previous feature, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Is this a bad thing? Only if you don't have a passion for amusingly overplotted heist movies featuring multiple gangs of British thugs, comically sadistic violence, and, in both films' most menacing role, the former footballer and cinematic objet d'artVinnie Jones, whose handsome slab of a face serves as a kind of wildlife refuge for his darting ferret eyes and nasty little gash of a mouth. Yes, Ritchie has a formula, but it hasn't yet devolved to the Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton stage. (Speaking of which, has anyone thought of hiring Jones to play 007?) In one major departure from the starless Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,Brad Pitt has been imported for Snatch to play a bare-knuckle boxer of Irish-gypsy extraction; in a film full of great character

turns, Pitt even manages to steal his scenes with an impenetrable accent that is one of the movie's running jokes, though it probably won't seem funny to the legions of Irish-gypsy actors who have a hard enough tin ie finding parts without having to compete with big-shot American movie stars. (Rating: ★★★)

BRUCE HANDY