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14
September 2005
Critics Savage
Ritchie's New Film
Director
Guy Ritchie's latest gangster film
Revolver has received stinging criticism
in its first reviews.
His wife
Madonna wore a sling as she accompanied
him to the world premiere at the Toronto
Film Festival on Sunday.
But
Screen International declared it a
"convoluted, risibly overwrought muddle"
that would leave audiences "bewildered and
disappointed".
And the
Hollywood Reporter laid into its
"pretentious style and fractured
storytelling".
It is
Ritchie's first film since Swept Away,
which won five Razzie Awards - for
Hollywood's worst offerings - in 2003.
Revolver features a criminal who revives a
feud with a gangland boss and stars Jason
Statham, Ray Liotta and Andre 3000 of
hip-hop group OutKast.
Screen
International's critic Allan Hunter wrote
it was unlikely to revive Ritchie's
fortunes.
Fans of
Ritchie's first film, Lock Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels, would see it, Screen
International said - but "word of mouth
will be a killer".
And some
twists and turns "merely provoked derisive
laughter among the preview audience", it
added.
The
Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, predicted
Revolver's box office business would be
"modest at best".
"The
movie spins wildly in circles, continually
doubling back on itself, repeating scenes
- once even backward - and lines of
dialogue until a viewer loses a grip on
what is supposed to be real," critic Kirk
Honeycutt wrote.
"The
film's pretentious style and fractured
storytelling preclude any audience
involvement in the coy melodrama," he
added.
Ritchie
said the film was designed to make viewers
think."I think I got fed up with films
that don't make you think," he said. "I
liked the idea of one that you have to be
dancing around with. I like my mind to be
engaged when I watch a film. So, the idea
was really to put five films in
one."
Liotta
described making the film with Ritchie as
"definitely one of my better experiences
as an actor".
Madonna
travelled to the premiere less than a
month after suffering three cracked ribs,
a broken collarbone and a broken hand in a
horse
riding
accident.
"You
would have had to broken both my arms and
both my legs for me to not come here," she
told reporters.
On the
fourth anniversary of the attacks in New
York and Washington, she also discussed
9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
"We have
had another natural disaster that's kind
of making that look like nothing in
comparison," she said. "Well not nothing,
but it's worse in a lot of
ways."
The
Toronto Film Festival has also hosted
premieres of Steve Martin's romantic
comedy Shopgirl and Sir Anthony Hopkins'
adventure movie The World's Fastest
Indian.
Sir
Anthony plays Burt Munro, a New Zealander
who set speed records on a motorcycle in
his 60s in the 1960s, and the film
received a standing ovation in
Toronto.
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