Category Archives: Satirical ultra-violence

Snatch (2000)

From NetFlix:

An Irish gypsy gets involved in a match-fixing boxing racket, a vast diamond heist is about to go down and London’s gangster underworld is blown open in this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, twisty crime caper featuring a motley cluster of characters. Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) writes and directs; Stephen Graham, Dennis Farina, Rade Serbedzija, Jason Statham, Benicio Del Toro and Brad Pitt star.

“Snatch” is yet another example of what I call “satirical ultra-violence”. Think “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”. Or just think “Jason Statham”. Probably an early example of this type of film was “Pulp Fiction”.

However, in this case Jason Statham is not an action doll. Instead he is the sarcastic well-spoken narrator with a really stupid sidekick Tommy. In fact, despite the many sometimes difficult-to-understand British dialects, the dialog is often very polite understated English spoken in moments of complete destruction or mayhem. There are many wonderful sight gags that made me laugh out loud. And of course there is a lot of VIOLENCE, although I have trouble remembering any visible gore. The idea is to laugh at violence that seems too improbable to be possible. What have we come to ?

As usual there are many characters and many subgroups all interacting. If you don’t mind the violence, than just enjoy the nonsense and mayhem. You will love the dog!