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Why Guy Ritchie Should Stick To Gangster Movies
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Jul 25, 2025
Guy Ritchie's first two movies Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels put the director on the map in the gangster film genre. Though Guy Ritchie's next run of films, mostly from major studios, would not live up to his original outings. Aladdin, King Arthur, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E, we're all panned by critics. Until he rediscovered his roots with The Gentleman, proving that maybe Guy Ritchie should just stick to gangster movies.
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This fish is bad. It's off
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Bad? In that case, if you don't want to eat it, you probably want to wear it
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That utterly bizarre moment was from 2002's Swept Away, widely regarded as one of the worst
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movies ever made. And at the time, people assumed it was lousy because it was just a vanity project
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that Guy Ritchie directed for his then-wife, Madonna. After all, the two films he made
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previously, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, were both truly great. But in retrospect
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Swept Away was really just the first clear sign that maybe Guy Ritchie should stick to gangster
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movies. By 1998, Quentin Tarantino had directed Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown
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All three were, in one way or another, about hip gangsters who riffed their way through tightly
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woven small crime stories. They had punchy dialogue, non-traditional structures, and each
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was arguably a masterpiece. The world was high on the director and his style, so everyone took notice when a British
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film called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels began drawing comparisons. Lock, Stock is about four small-time hoods who find themselves going to desperate lengths
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to square a debt to a gangster who cheated them in a card game. Among others, the movie starred future guy Richie Mainstay, Jason Statham, and there
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are certainly similarities to Tarantino's work. Ritchie's movie was also about an ensemble of hip, small-time criminals caught up in a web of underworld intrigue
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And like many of Tarantino's characters, they riffed razor-sharp dialogue on topics ranging from things trivial to sinister
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You can go on a plastic bag tonight, John. You owe what you owe
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And by the time this tan's faded, you want to have paid. Lockstock was a hit with audiences and earned positive reviews
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It won a BAFTA for Film of the Year and established Richie a reputation as a promising up-and-comer
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Expectations were high, and in 2000, Richie would release the movie that would cement his reputation as an auteur, Snatch
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Once again, the movie was a London-set, small-stakes crime story featuring an ensemble cast of colorful criminals and lovable losers
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And once again it utilized the talents of Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones Like its predecessor Snatch went all in on bantering slang dialogue flashbacks gallows humor and a whole lot of foul language
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Shut up and sit down, you big ball f***. But thanks to the buzz around Lockstock
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Richie was able to bring some star power to the proceedings in the form of Brad Pitt
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who got to play one of the most memorable roles of his career, the bare-knuckle boxer Mickey O'Neill
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The movie was also a perfect marriage between style and substance. The rhythms of Ritchie's dialogue and the calamitous plot developments faced by his characters
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are mirrored in the frenetic pace of his storytelling. And the abrupt freeze frames, use of slow motion and speed ramping, as well as music
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and narration, help put the audience in the minds of his characters. And it worked brilliantly
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Snatch was a box office success and, over time, developed into something of a cult classic
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Today, it's easy to identify as the movie that perfected the filmmaking style Guy Ritchie
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is most famous for, but it wasn't immediately perceived as a masterpiece. In fact, while it
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fared well with audiences, critics were more mixed on the film. Roger Ebert, for example
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thought the movie was too similar to Lockstock, a feeling echoed by several others
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This movie is basically just the first movie recycled. And if that was a problem, it was worse than they knew because both movies were preceded by the 1995
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short film The Hard Case, which contained many of the stylistic earmarks of Richie's more famous
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works. It even used several characters and situations that clearly served as prototypes
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to elements of Lock, Stock, and Snatch. The short isn't publicly available, but a circulating
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version with broken audio proves that whether it's from his personal experiences or something
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about the genre that uniquely ignites his imagination, Guy Ritchie was a natural with
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gangster films from day one. But perhaps to avoid being pegged as a one-trick pony, or maybe because
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in 2000 he married Madonna, Ritchie's third feature would be the now notorious Swept Away
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and to call it a huge stylistic departure would be a massive understatement. Stepping outside of
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his comfort zone to awkward effect, Ritchie's remake of Lena Wirtmiller's 1974 film was
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ostensibly a romantic comedy, only pretty much no one found it romantic or funny. The movie was
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savaged by critics and rejected by audiences Most of the criticism was directed at Madonna performance but Ritchie didn fare much better Ritchie then wisely stepped back toward the crime genre
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and re-partnered with Jason Statham for Revolver. But apparently still determined to prove he could do something different
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he infused the film with philosophical and religious references. Together with its confusing, frenetic plot
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the movie turned out to be something of a mess, and it struck out with both critics and audiences
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Possibly sensing that he needed to return to safer creative ground, In 2007, Ritchie jumped into production on Rock and Rolla
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It was another cockney gangster movie, but unlike the tonally odd Revolver
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Rock and Rolla was more like a cousin to Lock, Stock and Snatch. Reviews were more mixed than they were for those films
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but the movie was a success at the box office. And while its success seemed to lend some credence to the growing suspicion
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that Ritchie was only good at making one type of movie, it was generally considered a return to form
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It was also enough to earn Ritchie a chance to direct 2009's Sherlock Holmes
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starring Robert Downey Jr., who was at the time experiencing something of a career renaissance
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thanks to his widely popular role as Iron Man. The movie leaned into elements of the original stories Richie felt had been underplayed in previous adaptations
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and his Holmes was a much more action-heavy version of the character than the public was used to seeing
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As a fan of Holmes since childhood, Richie's connection to the work gave it something of a spark
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and while critics were mixed to positive about the film, audiences came in droves
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It scored big at the box office and earned a sequel, but it also signaled the start of a new phase in Richie's career, the big studio movie phase, and it would be a strange time for his fans
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That's because while 2011's Sherlock Holmes' A Game of Shadows was a box office success, it didn't fare as well with critics, and it felt less like a Guy Ritchie movie than the first one did
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which is to say Richie's own creative style was proving difficult to reliably wed to the standard trappings of big-budget studio films
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It's a problem that would become more evident over the course of his next three movies
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The Man From U.N.C.L., King Arthur, Legend of the Sword, and Aladdin
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The Man From U.N.C.L., for example, was cited for Richie's stylish direction
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but writing spy stories was apparently not his thing, and the movie couldn't overcome
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a lousy script that even Quentin Tarantino thought was stupid The movie flopped and lost million for the studio And despite a general consensus that it had some fun action in it King Arthur
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also suffered from a subpar script. It was a historic bomb panned by critics and ignored by
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audiences. It lost nearly twice what Man from U.N.C.L.E. did, and a planned six-film franchise
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never materialized. Ritchie's live-action remake of the 1992 Disney animated classic Aladdin
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on the other hand, was a smash hit that did over a billion dollars at the global box office
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But as a nearly shot-for-shot imitation of the animated original, the movie made Richie's
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personal filmmaking style all but invisible. Fans could be forgiven for suspecting Richie's
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auteur days were over and he would be leaning henceforth into more commercial studio fare
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But in 2019, he wrote and directed The Gentleman, an action comedy about an American pot dealer who
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goes to England to sell his business. The movie earned comparisons to Lockstock and The Gentleman
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was a box office success. Similarly, 2021's Wrath of Man, which reunited the director with
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Jason Statham for an action crime story, was warmly embraced by critics and fans
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Since then, Ritchie has made two films. 2023's spy spoof Operation Fortune
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Ruth Stiguer, received mediocre reviews and was pulled from distribution because its Ukrainian
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villains were considered in bad taste after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War
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Meanwhile, Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, a pensive war film set in Afghanistan
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earned positive reviews, but has also been specifically cited for its distracting use
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of Richie's stylistic trademarks. It's hard not to admire Richie's refusal to be stylistically
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pigeonholed, and certainly audiences don't just want to see him make endless remakes of his
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greatest hits, but it's also hard to ignore that Guy Richie seems to be most at home when he's
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telling stories about small-time criminals and lovable losers in the underworld of London and
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telling them in his own unique way. And that might be because starting with The Hard Case
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that style was specifically developed to tell those particular kinds of stories
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That's why it's pretty hit or miss in other genres, or when slathered on top of existing properties
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The bottom line is that when he's in his wheelhouse, making the films he seems he was born to make
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Guy Ritchie is one of the great directors of his time. So maybe he just sticked to doing that
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