Revolver (2005/I)

Director:

Guy Ritchie

Writers:

Luc Besson (adaptation)
Guy Ritchie (written by)

Release Date:

22 September 2005 (Russia)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline:

Your mind will not accept a game this big

Plot:

Gambler Jake Green enters into a game with potentially deadly consequences.

Plot Keywords:

Casino | Prison | Gambling | Disease | Boss

Cast

Jason Statham	...	Jake
Ray Liotta	...	Macha
Vincent Pastore	...	Zach
André Benjamin	...	Avi
Terence Maynard	...	French Paul
Andrew Howard	...	Billy
Mark Strong	...	Sorter
Francesca Annis	...	Lily Walker
Anjela Lauren Smith	...	Doreen
Elana Binysh	...	Rachel
Faruk Pruti	...	Ivan (Billy's Bodyguard)
Shend	...	Teddy (Billy's Bodyguard)
Bill Moody	...	Al
Stephen Walters	...	Joe
Vincent Riotta	...	Benny

MPAA:

Rated R for violence, language and some nudity.

Runtime:

115 min

Country:

France | UK

Language:

English | Cantonese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital

Certification:

UK:15 | Ireland:16 | Switzerland:16 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:16 (canton of Vaud) | Portugal:M/16 | Finland:K-15 | Singapore:M18 | Japan:PG-12 | Netherlands:16 | Argentina:16 | Germany:16 | Australia:MA (2009) | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Isle of Man

Company:

Europa Corp.

Trivia:

Harvey Keitel passed on this project.

Goofs:

Crew or equipment visible: At first when he gets to his house, before he gets to the door, you can see the crew in the reflection in the car's paint.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Jake Green: One thing I've learned in the last seven years: in every game and con there's always an opponent, and there's always a victim. The trick is to know when you're the latter, so you can become the former.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Saturday Night Live: Robert De Niro/Destiny's Child (#30.8)" (2004)

Soundtrack:

Beethoven's Piano Sonata No.14 in C Sharp-Minor, Op. 27, No. 2

Not a crime against cinema by any means

Neither the total disaster the UK critics claimed nor the misunderstood masterpiece its few fanboys insist, Revolver is at the very least an admirable attempt by Guy Ritchie to add a little substance to his conman capers. But then, nothing is more despised than an ambitious film that bites off more than it can chew, especially one using the gangster/con-artist movie framework. As might be expected from Luc Besson's name on the credits as producer, there's a definite element of 'Cinema de look' about it: set in a kind of realistic fantasy world where America and Britain overlap, it looks great, has a couple of superbly edited and conceived action sequences and oozes style, all of which mark it up as a disposable entertainment. But Ritchie clearly wants to do more than simply rehash his own movies for a fast buck, and he's spent a lot of time thinking and reading about life, the universe and everything. If anything its problem is that he's trying to throw in too many influences (a bit of Machiavelli, a dash of Godard, a lot of the Principles of Chess), motifs and techniques, littering the screen with quotes: the film was originally intended to end with three minutes of epigrams over photos of corpses of mob victims, and at times it feels as if he never read a fortune cookie he didn't want to turn into a movie. Rather than a commercial for Kabbalism, it's really more a mixture of the overlapping principles of commerce, chess and confidence trickery that for the most part pulls off the difficult trick of making the theosophy accessible while hiding the film's central (somewhat metaphysical) con.

The last third is where most of the problems can be found as Jason Statham takes on the enemy (literally) within with lots of ambitious but not always entirely successful crosscutting within the frame to contrast people's exterior bravado with their inner fear and anger, but it's got a lot going for it all the same. Not worth starting a new religion over, but I'm surprised it didn't get a US distributor. Maybe they found Ray Liotta's intentionally fake tan just too damn scary?