Such is life.
When I was younger - so much younger than today - I saw Revolver after it had come out because, as I think I've covered in some previous entry somewhere, I really used to be deeply into Guy Ritchie's films.
If you've seen Revolver, you may find this funny, especially given the dodginess of Jason Statham's facial hair choices in the film. Seriously, that Fu Man Chu mustache / stubble combo is intense.
Revolver is, however, an interesting film - in my opinion - if you take it apart and consider the pieces, rather than the way they've been smooshed together.
Visually, for instance, it's fascinating - the colour palette is amazing, because it's more than just the orange/blue spin the colour wheel and pick two opposites school of thinking. (That said, Ray Liotta does spend a lot of time in blue light - or with a blue filter on the shot - while he's ostensibly tanning.)
There's also some innovative camerawork that needs paying heed to, also - especially during Sorter's very calm, very collected rampage towards the end, which is camerawork like you've never seen put together, where the camera never stops moving but the shot keeps changing (and the shots - a pun, or play on words - keep coming).
It's also worth locating the film in the context of Strong's career, as an aside - after revolver, it's less Prime Suspect Six and more Syriana, Stardust and Sunshine, so there's an alphabetical moving-on as well as a stardom-related moving-up. You could say the same for André 3000 - and it just feels wrong to refer to him as André Benjamin - but in his case, his film career... Let's just not go there. It'll take you all of two clicks to check it out in Wikipedia, if you're so inclined. I really like Idlewild, but the rest...
Revolver is, however, not universally loved. I like to pretend that the criticism about the 'pretensions' and the 'plot' are just veiled digs at Jason Statham's facial hair, but the fact is that the plot is a bit pretentious, but this is only a bad thing because it keeps trying to ground itself in a gangster story. Ostensibly there are two plotlines;
- Green is out for revenge on Macha because Green's sister-in-law ended up dead following the last time they were involved
- Green is trying to dissipate his id - which is named, I think, Sam Gold, although Sam Gold is a collective term for every character's id - by confronting his primal, fight-or-flight fight-or-fuck urges.
Okay. Pretentious.
The second one, however, is arguably the more interesting of the storylines, because it skips merrily away from consensus reality and moves the viewer into a world where two criminals - who may or may not exist - can vanish from their cells in solitary confinement without a trace, can predict the future (with a limited range) and can cure a man of a degenerative blood disease by making him donate his entire fortune to charity.
It's all figurative, don't you know, because by ridding himself of his ill-gotten gains, Green is cleansing his karma (and doing so even more by displacing his largess onto his enemy for them to take the credit). Green, having spent his two years out of prison -
- And yes, watching someone get released from prison then immediately cutting to black and Two Years Later is just plain cheeky -
- making money using his ingenious con system taught to him by his maybe-cellmates, trapping the three people responsible for his sister-in-law's death in the web of their boss to their eventual detriment then demise and then walking up to his nemesis and winning a fortune from them on the flip of a chip, has technically rotten karma, and it's all because of his id.
I don't know if I actually have to italicise id, but I'm enjoying doing so, so...
If Mr Ritchie had simply played it out as a straight revenge tale - Snatch meets Ocean's Eleven - then it would have been just another cockney-ish gangster tale in his canon of gangster tales. If he'd taken it all the other way and just went for full-on Kabbalah mysticism, it would, in theory, have had even less of an audience. So in a way - in a roundabout way, although as much of a roundabout way as a driving tour in Milton Keynes - Revolver is the ideal, crazystrange mix of 'Themes Guy Ritchie Knows How To Do" and "Themes Guy Ritchie Was Interested In At The Time", or at least the right mix to draw an audience, however small.
Here's something final to ponder on - using my atrophied film information-finding skills, Revolver has a slight weirdness to it's statistics. For one, I can't find out what the original budget was.
The last film I ever had this trouble with was The Spirit. Don't ask. Seriously, don't ask.
Spiraling out from this, consider that, according to my limited sources, Revolver had a box office of $84,738 in America, which is shocking. That's just under $1700 per state, or $0.0003 per person in the USA, although that's using the current population for the statistic, which is misleading.
Were there just no Ray Liotta fans who wanted to see his arse on screen in blue lighting out there enough to justify a ticket to the film? Was it just not marketed, at all? Don't get me wrong, it went on to gross nearly $7 million in Overseas Territories, i.e. Not The USA, but still, I'm assuming that it cost more than seven and a half million to make, because it's so damn sparkly.
Plus, it only cost me 80p to buy.
It was worth the price.
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