At the time, critics were largely dismissive of Snatch aside from the insane character work by Brad Pitt. Now, the film can be seen as Guy Ritchie carving out his own lane for life while still being hungry enough to put maximum effort into constructing the intricate script. He wasn’t spinning his wheels or making Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with a bigger budget. Snatch is the kind of film Ritchie would return to over and again between bigger projects and bigger risks. The ensemble crime film is a door always open to him.
Ritchie is one of the busiest mainstream directors, with about two features and a TV project every year. (His recent Young Sherlock is some of his best work.) He’s worked with a lot of actors, usually every project centers around three big names. Snatch has some American names, aside from Pitt there’s Benecio del Toro and Dennis Farina. It was Pitt who approached Ritchie about being in his sophomore feature, and Ritchie might’ve given him the central role of Turkish (played by Jason Statham, with hair), but Pitt didn’t sound natural with the London accent. He was recently criticized for a weak Irish accent in The Devil’s Own. Ritchie combined that idea with his own complaints from American audiences that the accents in Lock, Stock were too thick and created The Pikey, an Irish boxer with an accent so thick nobody could understand him.
The moment for me when I became a member of the Guy Ritchie fan club is when he visualized the idea that being knocked out is like being underwater. An entire day of filming to create the effect that The Pikey was knocked out so hard he falls THROUGH the canvas into water. He stumbles around for a bit and then in a brilliant bit of editing, he surfaces to knock his opponent cold. Dozens of boxing movies, I’d never seen anything like it. The editing of that sequence, with narration by Statham and a song by Oasis on the Soundtrack convinced me that Guy Ritchie wasn’t going to be a flash in the pan.
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