Metacritic Film

Revolver

Starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, and Vincent Pastore

MPAA RATING: R for violence, language and some nudity

Samuel Goldwyn Films
Crime  |  Drama  |  Suspense/Thriller
115 minutes | Color
France / UK
Released In Theaters December 7, 2007

Gambler and conman Jake Green always ran with a bad crowd, and it cost him seven years of his life when he took the rap for mean Dorothy Macha and wound up in jail. After his release, Jake becomes unbeatable at the tables using a formula for the ultimate con that he learned from two mysterious fellow prisoners. Now he is ready to take his revenge. Macha is plotting to eliminate his ruthless rival, Lord John, and has staked his credibility on a huge drug deal with the all-powerful Sam Gold. Jake visits Macha at his casino and humiliates him publicly in a game of chance. Macha, fearing more of the same medicine, sends his goons to "take care of" Jake. His life is saved by enigmatic Zach, who, with his equally inscrutable partner Avi, offers Jake protection. Against his better judgment, Jake accepts. He soon finds himself playing the very last game he wants to be playing, and there is danger at every turn. But the biggest danger of all comes from a totally unexpected source... (Samuel Goldwyn Films)

WRITTEN BY
Luc Besson (adaptation)
Guy Ritchie

DIRECTED BY
Guy Ritchie

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

25 / 100

Critic Reviews

63 New York Post
Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.
50 The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz
By turns clever, impassioned, incoherent and silly.
50 Chicago Tribune Sid Smith
Part gambling heist, part graphic novel, part metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Revolver is a mess of many colors, few of them satisfying.
50 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Definitely deserves points for trying to be something thought-provoking and different, but it doesn't really stand up to analysis and it comes off as a pretentious mess.
42 Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
The movie butts up against the director's newfound pretensions -- pseudo-philosophical voice-over, psychobabble, faux-art-film plotting -- and turns incomprehensible.
40 Washington Post
Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.
38 New York Daily News
A few scenes are stylish enough to amuse, but they all add up to nothing - leaving you ten bucks short and feeling like a sucker.
38 Philadelphia Inquirer
Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.
30 The Hollywood Reporter
The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.
30 Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
It's no return to rock, this, but rather Ritchie's soporific, proggy-conceptual Film of Ideas, with Vivaldi interludes, fussbudget set design, recurrent references to chess, and a hit man inexplicably got up as Tati's Mr. Hulot.
30 Los Angeles Times
The result is a film that's main crime is inducing stupefying boredom with little payoff in the end.
25 San Francisco Chronicle
The movie's onslaught of psychobabble is the annoyance most likely to ruin your evening. Imagine getting stuck on a ski lift with Dr. Phil for nearly two hours.
25 ReelViews
Surprise of surprises, Revolver turns out to be worse than "Swept Away" - and not just by a little bit.
25 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Ritchie has said that it takes several viewings to fully understand what's going on in Revolver, but once will be enough for most to agree to take his word for it.
25 Miami Herald
The problem with Revolver is that it is Ritchie's first attempt at a ''serious'' look at the underworld, but the result is so pretentious and muddled it's almost a little embarrassing.
25 Boston Globe
The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.
25 TV Guide
Ritchie wraps this folderol in cinematic razzle-dazzle, including animated sequences, reverse motion, trompe l'oeil production design and tricky lighting. But it's still claptrap.
20 Variety
Guy Ritchie shoots a blank with Revolver, which replays the low-life criminal shtick from his first two features with an ill-advised overlay of pretension. The action, attitude and wise-guy talk all feel moldy this time around.
12 Chicago Sun-Times
It is a "thriller" without thrills, constructed in a meaningless jumble of flashbacks and flash-forwards and subtitles and mottos and messages and scenes that are deconstructed, reconstructed and self-destructed. I wanted to signal the projectionist to put a gun to it.
10 Chicago Reader
This 2005 feature offered me my first taste of Guy Ritchie's macho-centric artiness, and I hope it's my last.
8 Portland Oregonian
Although it contains crime and absurdity, it's not thrilling or funny and the title doesn't refer to a gun.

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