If a spoiler alert is needed for a panel of real-life psychiatrists, consider yourself forewarned.
That’s how Guy Ritchie’s “Revolver” ends: with a series of brief clips of psychiatrists explaining the difference between the id and ego. Not exactly the Death Star exploding, is it?
Our experts have nothing directly to do with the plot, but they’re there to help explain the mess of a movie that has preceded them. “Revolver” is a hard-boiled crime flick with its mayhem aimed at the inner workings of the mind.
It’s filled with constant inner monologues, Machiavelli quotes and enough chess theory to make Bobby Fischer blush. All of this makes up the subtext to “Revolver,” which is otherwise the usual style-over-substance theatrics of Richie, whose films include “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” — but who is best known as Mr. Material Girl.
Jake Green (Jason Statham) is a con man who has been released from prison after seven years of solitary confinement. Somehow during this period, through some kind of prison-wall osmosis, he’s been schooled by his jailed neighbors on the art of war, deception and chess.
“Dangerous combination, chess and cons,” intones Green, leaving unsaid the lethal concoction of Boggle and blackmailers.
Released, Green is hellbent on revenge against the man who put him there: Ray Liotta’s Dorothy Macha (yes, Dorothy). Macha is a big-shot drug dealer who spends as much time as possible — as big-shot drug dealers are wont to do — standing naked in a fluorescent blue tanning room.
Beaten at the poker table by Green, Macha orders his assassination, which is thwarted thanks to the help of a mysterious business-card wielding Zack (Vincent Pastore of “The Sopranos”) and his partner Avi (Andre Benjamin, aka Andre 3000).
They inform Green that they’re loansharks and offer him their protection in return for his every last cent. Green is persuaded to do so because, oddly enough, he’s just been diagnosed with a rare blood disease that will leave him dead in three days. (It’s a bizarre specialty for Statham, whose character in 2006’s “Crank” had to keep his adrenaline up to keep his heart alive.)
All kinds of mystery, confusion and killing follows, including a dozen by a hit man whose specialty is shooting through walls (Mark Strong). It’s all fairly pointless and uninteresting, made worse by incessant voice-overs like, “You can only get smarter by player a smarter opponent.”
But Ritchie is hoping we’re captivated by the mind games.
“Revolver” has been advertised with the tagline: “The greatest trick that he ever pulled was making you believe that he is you” — a ripoff of the famous line from “The Usual Suspects” (“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”).
To Ritchie, the true enemy lies inside each of us, and it’s only when Green realizes this that he’s free. He laments that people are “approval junkies,” and Liotta’s character is left to symbolize this. In his parting shot, he cries pathetically in his underpants: “Fear me!”
If all of this sounds incoherent ... well, it is.
“Revolver” has been around for a while, first playing at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005. It’s been cut by about 10 minutes and hopes to pick up enough box office on the cachet of Ritchie’s brand of stylish gunplay.
That Ritchie is at least attempting to add some brains to his capers may be a sign of growth. But after 2002’s terrible “Swept Away” and now “Revolver,” Ritchie has managed to make, back to back, two of the worst films any one director can lay claim to. Studios tend to take the camera away after such failures.