The Screen Addict | Ritchie
I remember vividly how I was first introduced with the work of Guy Ritchie.
During my “in-between years” after high school and before college, I didn’t want to make a rushed decision on how I was going to spend the next five to ten years of my life. As a result, I found myself hanging out at my friends’ bachelor pad in Amsterdam a lot.
Now this was a typical Man Cave, so there was always a lot of smoking and drinking going on. To amplify the experience, we used to get a ton of similarly-themed films from the rental place where one of my friends worked.
One of these films was a relatively unknown British Indie called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). The cover featured no familiar faces and it was really the fanatical word-of-mouth that made us decide to take a chance and rent this film.
Boy, what an eye-opener.
Ritchie’s feature debut was unlike anything we had seen up to that point. The streetwise, often hilarious dialogues and frantic Action-sequences drenched in non-chronological editing and super slomo, were a total breath of fresh air.
Unsurprisingly, Ritchie was soon dubbed The British Tarantino.
More highly original projects followed for Ritchie, many of which with his superstar girlfriend – later wife, and later again ex-wife – Madonna. For me, the height of the working relationship between Ritchie and The Queen of Pop was the refreshingly self-deprecating Star (2001), one of the Action-heavy short films commissioned by BMW for their brilliant commercial campaign The Hire (2003).
Check it out here.
My personal connection with Ritchie came about through Bill Block, the legendary producer of films like District 9 (2009) and Fury (2014), who was hired to head the post-Weinstein, post-Disney Miramax label.
Block wasted no time and started development of no less than three Guy Ritchie projects, two of ‘em starring Ritchie’s partner-in-Crime-films since LSaTSB – Jason Statham.
The first of this terrific threesome was The Gentlemen (2019), the script of which I read under the working title Bush. I remember chortling over the cheekiness of writing and directing not one but two films with a reference to female private parts in the title – the other one being Snatch (2000) if you hadn’t figured that out yet…
Unfortunately, The Gentlemen lost its original title and we lost the bid on BeNeLux distribution rights. To add insult to injury – the follow up Cash Truck a.k.a. Wrath of Man (2021), frustratingly slipped through our fingers as well.
However, I recently caught Cash Truck on Blu-ray and although I feel that Ritchie will probably never best his first two films – I feel the same about Tarantino and his first three – the pic is definitely more than worth a watch.
Next for Block, Ritchie and Statham will be Operation Fortune a.k.a. Ruse de Guerre (2023) and if the model keeps delivering solid commercial and critical returns, who knows how many more collaborations will follow.
I, for one, will be front and center.
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Twitter (X): Robin Logjes | The Screen Addict