Thug Chic: Guy Ritchie’s RockNRolla

The plot is about some high-paid London lowlifes and a missing “lucky painting.” But the real suspense surrounding Guy Ritchie’s RockNRolla is this: Can the writer-director return to his early form and fame — when his debut feature Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels made him the hot young bloke — and emerge from the career burden of being Mr. Madonna? It’s got to be time-consuming, and reputation-deflating, for a distinctive filmmaker to be dodging the paparazzi, shopping for a baby in Malawi and enduring gossip that your wife is palling around with A-Rod. Simply finding time to work while sharing a flat with a longtime pop star who’s used to constant attention from her retinue has to be a delicate chore. (Not tonight, honey; I’ve got a script to finish.)

The good news about RockNRolla is that it more or less erases the tainted memories of Swept Away, the awful movie Ritchie made with Madonna, and the nearly incoherent Revolver, and marks Ritchie’s return to the form of the 1998 Lock, Stock and its 2000 follow-up Snatch. The not-so-good news about his third excursion into the London underworld is that he’s reusing the early films’ milieu and style. It’s an attractive template that allows for some vivid variations and lets good actors play it big and nasty, but there’s no question that the form has become formula. The real question is: at what level? Let’s say somewhere between the fast glamour of Formula One racing and the cosmetic cover-up of Grecian Formula 16.

Once again Ritchie needs a narrator to set the tone and occasionally explain the plot machinations to slower members of the audience. His name is Archie (incarnated with just the right mix of menace and mystery by go-to Brit character actor Mark Strong), and at the beginning he helpfully deciphers the movie’s title: a higher, more voracious strain of London gangster. “We all like a bit of the good life: some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour or the fame. But a rocknrolla, oh, he’s different. Why? Because a real rocknrolla wants the f______ lot.”

Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) runs a mob called the Wild Bunch; he looms over his lads with a vulture’s hunched avidity, and his intimidating stare lasers right through his Ray-Bans. Lenny’s been trying to close a real estate deal with one of the new kids on the block, a Russian tough named Uri (Karel Roden). But people keep stealing the multimillion-pound swag. The culprits happen to be a couple of Lenny’s enforcers, One Two (Gerard Butler, of 300) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), working on tips One Two gets from Stella (Thandie Newton), a silky lawyer of no fixed ethical abode. Uri has also, as an earnest of fellowship, lent Lenny his “lucky painting”; this, of course, and much to Lenny’s chagrin, gets nicked. The movie follows the trail of the missing artwork and throws in another intrigue for free: the search for an inside snitch, whose singing to the police has meant jail time for most of Lenny’s underlings.

(See TIME’s pictures of the week here.)

Lenny considers himself less a thug than a commercial facilitator (“What d’you think we are? Gangsters?”), and Archie seconds that delusion. (“Keep your receipts,” he tells one associate, “’cause this ain’t the Mafia.”) But the milieu is redolent of many a mob story, with the rocknrollas as goodfellas, and their hangouts as low-London franchises of the Ba-Da-Bing. The dialogue has an East End accent, but it’s basically Tarantinian chatter — the joking among ruthless men with roguish rhetoric and short fuses — leavened for variety with the odd upmarket observation. “Beauty is a cruel mistress,” Uri says of his painting, with a mixture of connoisseurship and threat. Some of the lines could almost be put to music, like “The streets are alive with the sound of pain.”

Ritchie loves characters who provide conflict and, more important, congestion; his pictures are downright garish with local color. A few from this fresco: Tank (Nonso Anozie), an Anglo-Afro bruiser who’s fond of Merchant-Ivory dramas; Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy), a gang member who unexpectedly plights his homoerotic troth to the flummoxed One Two (“What exactly is it you want to do to me, Bob?”); and, best of the lot, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), a junk rocker who has faked his own death to sell more CDs. It’s a star-making part for Kebbell, and he’s a delight to watch, giving it the creepy swagger of American-style bravura acting. (Disappearing into the crowd are the two actual Americans imported to play Johnny’s handlers, Chris (Ludacris) Bridges and Entourage’s Jeremy Piven.)

Ritchie has a portraitist-satirist’s gift for creating supporting characters that’s almost in the league of Preston Sturges, the pinwheeling comic genius of 1940s Hollywood. Now if only he could duplicate Sturges’ range of milieux, from high society (The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story) to chicanerous politics (The Great McGinty) to the working class in big cities (Christmas in July) and small towns (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero). If appreciation for RockNRolla’s entertainment abundance is freighted with disappointment, it’s partly because Ritchie’s early work has been elaborated on in sharp Brit gangland capers like Layer Cake and The Bank Job. But the main problem is that Ritchie keeps playing the same old song. It’s a swell tune, and we don’t mind hearing it every few years, but we’d welcome another subject in a transposed key. Even the Material Girl tries out fresh material.

Ritchie must think he’s onto something new, because the end of the movie hints at a sequel. But first the director has eyes on a remake, or an updating, of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with either Robert Downey Jr. or Russell Crowe as the drug-using supersleuth of 221B Baker Street. Count on Ritchie to find pungent thuggery in foggy London town and to juice up the plot with Victorian-age rocknrollas.

(See TIME’s pictures of the week here.)