Snatch (5 Stars)

• Franky Four Fingers arrives in London with a huge stolen diamond, intending to sell it to Doug the Head.
• Boris the Blade wants the diamond and arranges for Franky to be robbed.
• Turkish and Tommy are involved in the illegal boxing business, working for the vicious gangster Brick Top.
• Turkish's boxer gets into trouble, forcing him to find a replacement.
• He approaches Mickey, an Irish Traveller who agrees to fight for money.
• Mickey, however, has his own ideas about how the fight should go.
• Meanwhile, Boris's plans for the diamond become increasingly complicated.
• Sol, Vinny and Tyrone get involved in an attempt to steal the diamond for themselves.
• All the various schemes gradually begin to overlap, with the boxing match and the diamond at the centre of everything.
• By the time the dust settles, almost nobody has ended up with quite what they expected.

I usually complain when a film has a complicated plot, but "Snatch" is a wonderful exception. Everything is remarkably easy to understand while you're watching it. You know what everybody wants and you generally know what they're trying to do. It's only afterwards, when you try to explain the entire story to somebody else, that you realise just how complicated it actually is.

That is one of the film's greatest achievements. Guy Ritchie gives us a huge collection of characters and several apparently separate stories, but somehow never makes the film difficult to follow. Everyone is so distinctive that you quickly know who's who, and every new complication seems perfectly logical at the time.

It's also very funny, but I wouldn't call "Snatch" a comedy. There's a real sense of danger underneath the humour, particularly whenever Brick Top appears. These are not lovable rogues getting into amusing scrapes. They're criminals, and some of them are extremely unpleasant criminals.

The cast is superb. Jason Statham is the closest thing we have to a normal person in this collection of lunatics, while Alan Ford makes Brick Top genuinely intimidating. But Brad Pitt steals the film as Mickey. His performance is hilarious, unpredictable and completely different from anything else in the film.

And then there's the style. The editing is fast without making the story incomprehensible, the dialogue is packed with memorable lines and the whole thing has an energy that carries you through the increasingly tangled plot.

It's probably the best gangster film I've ever seen. And remarkably, despite its complicated plot, I never once felt lost.

The problem is that if somebody asked me to explain exactly what happens in Snatch, I'd have absolutely no idea where to start.

Success Rate:  + 6.4

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