This was released on DVD by Sony Home Entertainment, and as such, I kept seeing trailers for it on all the other bad Sony DTV films I watched. I stuck it on my Netflix queue, and it finally made its way to the top. I've been trying to figure out how a film directed by Guy Ritchie could only gross $75,000 over 12 screens here in the US. I was about to find out.
Revolver is a psychological whatever that takes place in Las Vegas. Jason Statham has just been released from jail, and he wants revenge on the guy that put him there: Ray Liotta. He gets his revenge, ripping him off of a bunch of cash, but is then caught up with two con men, played by Andre 3000 and the dude from the Sopranos that's in everything as a mafioso. He hemorrhages cash while trying to figure out what the con men are up to. Then he's gotta deal with Ray Liotta, who wants his money back. What a mess.
The only explanation I could find for why this film was given such a limited release was its complicated plot. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't find it that complicated. Sure, Ritchie put all sorts of little inside things throughout, but who needs to look for that crap? It's not germane to the plot at all, making it extraneous in a lackluster film like this. I don't know, I just wasn't feeling this one. I think Ritchie tried to go outside the box from his previous two efforts, but he didn't go outside enough, and so this movie suffered from an identity crisis that one of his psychiatrists he has at the end of the film could understand.
Jason Statham was pretty cool, but I've seen him in cooler. He never flexed his martial arts at all, which I would've loved to see. Maybe Ritchie could've dumped out the annoying stream of consciousness stuff he was doing and replaced it with scenes from The Transporter. I can't blame Statham for working with Ritchie on what must've sounded like a good project in pre-production.
Ruh-ruh-ruh-Ray Liotta. I kind of feel like he was wasted in this as a Tanorexic paranoid crime boss and owner of a casino. He wasn't wasted as the dad in Blow. He wasn't wasted as the main star in Goodfellas. He wasn't even wasted as the biker in Wild Hogs (an otherwise atrocious movie). But he was wasted here, and it sorta kinda hurts. Why make him Tanorexic? It's funny, and it'd be great if Dennis Hopper was a Tanorexic in a film (asking a goat if he could drink it's urine for the psychedelic properties). But not Ray Liotta. It made him look old and gross.
I liked Andre 3000 in this. He seemed a little off at the beginning, but as the picture went on, he got better. I think this, Idlewild, and Semi-pro are his better movies, and I think that might have more to do with the movies than him as an actor. Most rapper-turned-actors other than Tupac really aren't that good, but I think Andre 3000 might be the exception.
Vincent Pastore. That is the only time I'll mention his name. From here on it's the Guy From the Sopranos. I know he'd been around quite a bit before the hit HBO drama made him huge, but now it's like we can't see enough of him. Anyone that needs a Wiseguy character actor goes to him. It's ridiculous. And here we were supposed to believe he was some kind of super con man? I believed Andre 3000 as the chess master, but I couldn't see the Guy From the Sopranos as anything but the Guy From the Sopranos, and I'll probably never see him as anything but that.
If you're one of those people who gets all geeked up trying to find hidden meanings in things and don't have the wherewithal to tackle Finnigan's Wake, you might like this. Me, personally, I don't need to impress anyone with that kind of thing anymore, so I'm fine watching Dolph Lundgren blow shit up.
For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365686/
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