Revolver

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Revolver is a bad movie. Really bad. What starts as a sub-par Guy Ritchie crime flick in the vein of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels turns into – and I’m not kidding – a psychological lecture about how your Ego is actually a second consciousness that secretly tries to control your every thought and usually succeeds because your brain doesn’t know the difference between it and your first consciousness.

Or something. No one cares.

What’s worse, the only way Ritchie can introduce this concept is to sacrifice the movie’s plot, or rather the movie’s many plots; there’s a lot of stuff going on, and it all feels like it belongs in separate movies. One extravagant action scene is followed by something dark and tragic, followed by a philosophical conversation about chess. Ritchie made his schizophrenic style work in Barrels and Snatch, but here the movie goes so far off the rails that it actually forgets it’s even supposed to be telling a story.

We begin as Jake Green (Jason Statham with a full head of hair) is released from seven years in solitary confinement and immediately strikes up his old rivalry with mob boss Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta) again. I’m not really sure if Macha was responsible for his prison sentence or if he’s just a jerk; Liotta plays him as one of those ultra-sweaty super-angry guys who’s always seen in a bathrobe and underwear. The wild overacting is kind of fun, I guess. At least he put his all into it.

Things quickly turn strange for Green when he starts getting little cryptic notes – “Don’t take the stairs,” one says, right before he falls down a set of stairs. “Pick me up,” another one says, and as he bends down, a bullet goes flying over his head. The notes are the work of Zach and Avi (Vincent Pastore and Andre Benjamin), shadowy loan sharks who seem to be able to achieve anything they want.

So far, so good – Liotta’s character I’ve seen a few too many times before, but the introduction of Pastore and Benjamin seemed to give the movie new creative life. If only it wasn’t building up to nothing but the explanation that their powers come from their ability to separate their Ego from their Consciousness blah blah blah blah blah.

(If I’m not explaining the movie’s psychological rantings well enough, that’s probably because they don’t make any sense.)

Also involved in the movie are a hitman who has a crisis of conscience – one of the better parts of the movie, which makes sense as he really has no reason to be in it – and a mysterious man named Mr. Gold who everyone seems to be afraid of but no one seems to have seen. I wonder if he really exists or whether he’s the movie’s clumsy metaphor for the Ego’s triumph over the human consciousness.

The movie ...