GOD, THE DEVIL & GUY RITCHIE

REVIEWED - REVOLVER: The director's earlier ladflicks are works of art compared with this ridiculous brew of violence and metaphysics, writes Donald Clarke

THE story goes that Guy Ritchie wanted to include a great many more references to the Kabbalah - the quasi-religion that he and his increasingly pointless wife follow - than have actually made it into this nauseating pottage of adolescent metaphysics and tastefully lit violence.

As it happens, Revolver is so wilfully obscure, so packed with impenetrable aphorisms and so liturgically lengthy that it could form the basis for a new Californian faith. University theology departments could devote courses to investigating phrases such as: "When you change the rules on what controls you, you change what you can control." Sunday schools could ponder the three minutes (or so, as I eventually left) of black screen that sits where the end credits normally appear. Icons, as inanimate as the original, could be struck of Jason Statham's big hairy head to ward off the unfriendly spirits of Coherence and Lucidity.

One might reasonably argue that films as good as David Lynch's Mulholland Dr and Wong Kar Wai's 2046 have been shot of stories that made less sense. Sadly, Guy Ritchie's talents, never abundant, now seem scanty in comparison not just with those of Wong and Lynch, but even with those of the cheeky entertainer who made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. A wearying monologue interspersed with unattractive visual non-sequiturs, Revolver should kill off that bit of Ritchie's career that survived the awful Swept Away.

So, what's it about, you ask? Heaven alone knows. Jason Statham, a regular Ritchie co-conspirator, stars as a conman who gets on the wrong side of an evil crime kingpin - God, the Devil, Death - played, with no concessions to restraint, by Ray Liotta.

In its first half hour the film comes across like a harmless, if more than usually boring, entry in the stick-the-shooters-in-the-van genre. But slowly, incrementally, the gibberish mounts until the enterprise is totally overcome by absurdity. In Ritchie's defence, Revolver does pioneer an entirely new kind of terrible. In that sense alone it is innovative.