Review in a Hurry: This seriocomic thriller from Guy Ritchie (aka Mr. Madonna) is more punk than rock, more hackneyed than cockney, and it never gets rolling at all.
The Bigger Picture: Crime has really stopped paying off for Ritchie, who had some good fun with Snatch and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. His latest effort has the sprawling cast of characters and all the convolutions you'd expect, but none of the wit or joy necessary to distract from its shallowness.
It's a shame, as there are some fine performances and intriguing characters in RocknRolla, all utterly lost in Ritchie's aren't-we-clever machinations. Gerard Butler and The Wire's Idris Elba make a watchable pair of ambitious, overmatched thugs, and everyone else does a fair job of maintaining the ultracool vibe Ritchie's aiming for.
But is it too much to ask for some heat in a genre that's all about keeping the plot cooking? The real-estate scams at the heart of the plot are ultimately as irrelevant as the willfully pointless MacGuffin (a Russian businessman's "lucky painting") that drives the action. And it's one thing to make an intentionally messy story, but another thing entirely to clutter it with redundant scenes that don't pay off. You'll leave RocknRolla none the wiser than you came in; staying away from it would be better still.
The 180—a Second Opinion: An impossibly hard team of ex-Russian military thugs provides some welcome comic relief to the film's middle third; their Wile E. Coyote-meets-Terminator antics make what could have been a pedestrian chase scene into something hysterically memorable. If Ritchie's promised sequel materializes, he'd better find a way to bring these guys back.