Revolver (15) (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Revolver (15)

GAMBLING is a matter of nerve and luck. Writer-director Guy Ritchie certainly has a nerve, daring to get behind a film camera after the horrors of Snatch and Swept Away.

His luck stinks too and it's not going to change with Revolver, a frankly impenetrable and pretentious thriller laden with swathes of esoteric Kabbalah wisdom.

Opening with four quotations, among them "The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look" and "You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent", the first hour makes fleeting sense.

Hotshot gambler Jake Green (Jason Statham) takes the rap for gangster Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta) and spends seven years behind bars, in solitary confinement.

Refusing to snitch on Macha, Jake strikes up a relationship with his neighbouring cellmates, a master chess player and a master conman, who tutor him in deception via messages scrawled in books from the prison library.

Jake never meets his mentors and they disappear from the prison without trace.

Upon his release, Jake and his pals, including his brother Billy (Andrew Howard), seek out Macha at his glitzy casino and they humiliate him in public. Weighed down with a bag stuffed full of Macha's cash, the group leaves; Macha responds by ordering his best assassin, Sorter (Strong), to kill Jake and his posse.

Miraculously, Jake survives the ensuing bloodbath thanks to the timely intervention of loan sharks Zach (Vincent Pastore) and Avi (Andre Benjamin).

They agree to act as Jake's bodyguards on two conditions, firstly he will give them all of his money and secondly he will do as they tell him, including answering questions as instructed.

Having agreed to Zach and Avi's peculiar demands, Jake finds himself at the centre of a war between rival gang leader Lord John (Tom Wu) and Macha, who is about to pull off a huge drug deal with the elusive Sam Gold.

Except nothing is quite what it seems...

The second half of Revolver is a convoluted mess, involving long sequences of characters talking to each other, and occasionally themselves, in voiceover, regurgitating the same cryptic lines. "The greatest con the Devil ever pulled is making you believe he is you", "I am you", "You are not me", "fear me, fear me."

It's like The Matrix meets The Usual Suspects, with a hint of Casino and Lock, Stock,...

There's no doubting Ritchie's stylistic flair - he uses lighting, slow motion, split screens and even animation to startling effect.

Unfortunately, his screenplay is a morass of cliches and spiritual gibberish.

In the film's most striking sequence, Jake gets stuck in an elevator, on the 13th floor, and begins a fierce argument with his inner voice. "I've had enough of this sh**, it's starting to do my head in," he rages. Finally, something we can agree on.

By Damon Smith