I normally wouldn't talk about Guy Ritchie.
He's so Hollywood, you know?
He makes dumb action movies.
He's a second-rate Tarentino,
I mean, look at this aesthetic, it's just a feature-length lager commercial.
Guy Ritchie is the flesh and blood incarnation of the word "bloke."
So when a patron asked me to talk about Guy Ritchie's film Revolver, I had no idea why.
Then I watched it.
[Mozart's "Requiem - Lacrimosa" playing ]
And I thought, "Oh."
That's why.
[ "Procession of the Nobles" by Rimsky-Korsakov ]
So here's my attempt to understand the plot of Revolver.
Feel free to try to explain it better in the comments,
but I'm already burned out by half-assed, poorly argued,
defenselessly shallow movies after the Mr. Nobody review I did,
So
This is a movie about a generic tough guy named Jake Green,
played by famed generic tough guy Jason Statham.
He's just been freed from a long stint in jail
and now is trying to get back at a man named Dorothy,
played by a far-too-frequently-naked Ray Liotta.
I'd say this was the lowest point of Liotta's career,
but this was two years before he played himself in Bee Movie, so...
Watch it Benson! I could blow right now!
This isn't a good fella, this is a BAD fella!
After getting out, Jake gets recruited by Sal from Sopranos and André 3000, of all people.
And after that's set up, the movie chugs along in this endless 20 goto 10 loop of
"We need you to do a thing."
"I did a thing."
"You are quite the doer of things, Mr. Green."
"We need you to do a thing."
"I did a thing."
"You are quite the doer of things, Mr. Green."
"We need you to do a thing."
"I did a thing."
"You are quite the-"
And so we get the vague sense of a gang war between this guy in the blue room
and this guy in the red room, with green in the middle.
Oh hey, it's a color motif.
There's also somebody named Sam Gold that everyone's afraid of.
Sam Gold.
Mr. Clandestine.
Mr. Black Magic! Mr. I-Run-This-Game-Gold!
No one sees Gold.
And meanwhile, Statham talks to himself a bunch,
so if you're a fan of gruff Cockney, well, it is a Guy Ritchie movie.
Sweating, like a crack whore clacking for affects.
Oh, they're smart.
Smart as a pair of a little boy's shoes.
Somewhere between hell and a hard place.
All of the dialogue is like this.
One foot in the grave and two hands on the coffin.
Cooked. Well-done. Stick a fork in me and see if I bleed.
[Kyle with a Cockney accent] Aren't we all just little teapots?
Short and fucked.
And that's not even including the dialogue written under that dorm room quote style
that late nineties, early 2000s filmmaking was in love with.
Guess how this speech is going to end.
What is the matrix?
What's in it for me?
See?
And I haven't even gotten to how adventerously mistaken the filmmaking gets.
It's not just that every major action setpiece doesn't work,
it's that they all don't work in their own unique way.
This one cuts just a tad too fast,
this one gets broken up by a pan-and-scan technique.
[gunshot]
See?
I can do it too.
It's not hard.
And finally, there's a--
What?! What are you--?
Borderlands? What?
What?!
[stereotypical Asian music]
Oh, God, this is on someone's demo reel, isn't it?
Kiss! My! Black! Ass!
And, of course, the voiceover!
We're approval junkies.
We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch.
The hip hip hoo-fucking-rah.
Kyle: Fed to the rules and you hit the ground running.
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb.
Oh wait, those are Smashmouth lyrics.
Wasn't I supposed to be summarizing a plot?
The alleged plot.
Where's your pride, Jake?
I've made a big mistake, Mr. Macha.
SHUT UP!
I underestimated your power and your intellect.
Right, so the big reveal? Major spoilers here.
Jake.
AFTER YOU!
That voiceover? That obnoxious 2 AM at a pub blathering?
I can hear you.
That voiceover... is the real bad guy.
I say, YOU DO!
[distorted] YOU DO
Yes.
How long have I looked after you?!
And the climax of the film plays out in a sequence I can only possibly describe as "Gollum-ing."
I am you!
... you're not me.
Come on!
You don't control me.
I control you.
[Smeagol voiceover] We told him to go away!
[Smeagol voiceover] And away he goes, precious!
Then, um, content warning, man panties.
Fear me.
And so, having killed the voiceover, Jake no longer fears Ray Liotta.
Fear me.
See? He doesn't fear him. It's a good movie.
Fear me.
And finally:
We didn't do this because we like you.
We did this because...
we are you.
Twist!
So the problem was that Jake was spending so much time listening to the voice in his head,
that he wasn't listening to the OTHER voices in his head!
What?!
Checkmate
So that's where the US cut ends.
The UK cut...
continues.
And it continues with an epilogue which,
I-- I just have to show you the actual editing.
We know Green's behind everything.
He took your powder, not Lord John.
FEA--
He's been playing games with us, and he's playing games with you.
FEAR ME!
FEAR MEEEE!
Shut up!
Fear me.
Shut up!
FEAR MEEEE!
So now it's Ray Liotta's turn to Gollum, and--
Okay, let's stop there.
Um, I know I skipped over a lot of plot stuff,
though I don't think it seems to matter, since the movie doesn't care either,
FEA--
Ritchie's clearly more interested in theme, which would explain all of the, um,
FEA--
that.
FEAR MEEE
But what is that theme?
Well, when this movie came out in 2005, there was a lot of speculation about that,
since at the time Guy Ritchie was married to, um...
oh, what's her name...?
Oh yeah.
And at this stage in her celebrity life,
Madonna was very publicly displaying her interest in an esoteric Rabbinical tradition
dating to medieval Jewish texts known as the Kabbalah.
It had some press coverage.
Uh, Madonna's doing some Kabbalah thing, you wanna do that?
So for Ritchie to put out something so baffling,
he clearly must have been influenced by whatever freaky-deaky
new age celebrity Hollywood bullshit they're obsessed with this month, right?
Well...
Kabbalah is a Hebrew word which, roughly translated,
means "that which is passed down," "it is received," or, um,
Can I get away with making that joke? I don't know.
But Kabbalah is a separate animal from Judaism proper.
It's a stupefyingly complex theological tradition
that occupies the same place that, say, Sufism does for mainstream Islam,
or Gnosticism does for mainstream Christianity.
But Kabbalah has seen a much greater reverence in popular Judaism,
whose teachings are so nuanced that Kabbalah has traditionally only been shared with Jewish men over 40,
since to teach to anyone younger would necessitate the dilution of complex concepts.
Kabbalah for kids!
Yeah, then it went mainstream.
So whatever Madonna learned at the Kabbalah center,
it was the kind that convinced her to spend ten grand on a swimming pool filled with "Kabbalah water."
I'm not Jewish, but I'm willing to bet that's not a thing.
So is Revolver based on Kabbalah?
Well, yes,
but only in that half-assed culturally appropriative way that Hollywood approaches every complex philosophy.
So, eh.
I mean, there's Kabbalah as written in the Zohar and the works of Isaac Luria,
interpreted for the modern world by philosophers like Gershom Scholem,
and then there's Kabbalah, the respectable form of Scientology.
What I'm saying is, there's a good chance that Ritchie's idea of Kabbalah
is quite different from my idea of Kabbalah
or, indeed, anyone's idea of Kabbalah.
I'm not even Jewish, so I really have no right to say whether or not he knows what he's talking about.
But I can try to figure out what I think he's talking about.
In his own words, Ritchie rather hamfistedly declares that, get this,
you are not your ego.
You've heard that voice for so long you believe it to be you.
In fact, that's how the credits end, with a group of psychologists explaining the role of the ego.
It disguises its thoughts as your thoughts, its feelings as your feelings, you think it's you.
It's repeated to the point of insecurity.
All perception of an enemy is a projection of the ego.
Thing is, Guy Ritchie is, um...
right?
There's definitely a long tradition in psychology of understanding the subject,
that is, the part of you that identifies as 'I,'
as being separate from the ego.
That is, the essence of our consciousness is distinct from the way that we identify that consciousness.
You can see it Lacanian psychology,
where the ego was something created by the subject during the mirror stage.
You can see it in the Christian tripartite man,
composed of a mortal body, the immortal soul, and the holy spirit.
You can see it in the poetry of Whitman and Baudelaire,
who would both write in first person as if speaking to their own souls.
And yes, Simpsons did it.
Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts.
Explain how.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Now as far as I can tell, Kabbalah doesn't have much to say about the nature of the self.
But it does have plenty to say about the relationship between God and humanity.
There's also a long tradition in Judaism of the distant, unknowable Godhead,
the infinite being from which all knowledge flows.
Kabbalahs call this the "ein sof," the true form of God before manifesting on earth.
It manifests on earth through what's known as the sephiroth.
No, get that away!
The sephiroth, meaning roughly ennumeration,
maps out the path that divine knowledge travels from the ein sof and reaches our world,
with each sephirah, or emination, representing a different way in which the infinite manifests.
There's a central column, a left masculine column, and a right feminine one.
I've read theories that gruff, macho Vincent Pastore
and slick, dapper André Benjamin represent these masculine and feminine aspects,
but if that's true, then why not make Benjamin's character a woman?
Or would that require a female character who isn't a silent, nude prop with a gun?
Guy.
But more likely, the meaning is in the names.
Jake is mentored by two men named Avi and Zach.
Avi, Zach, Jake.
Avraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The three patriarchs of the Israelites.
And Jacob as the protagonist is fitting.
This is the same Jacob who dreamt of Jacob's ladder and wrestled with an angel,
giving him the name Israel, "he who wrestles with God."
Another Hebrew name in the film is Samuel, the name of God.
Of course, it's shortened to Sam.
Do you know who Sam Gold is, Mr. Green?
The distant, unknowable Godhead.
Physically absent, but his presence maintained through the belief in his power.
Enter The Kabbalah Centre, teaching Judaism scrubbed of any actual Jewish rituals, myths, or practices,
diluted into a sort of "what is my purpose in life" self-help guide,
and I can start to understand how this cosmology can morph into a generic
"you are your own worst enemy" mantra.
Human sin caused the rift between humanity and God,
and it is human ego that prevents God's knowledge from entering you, and therefore...
FEAR MEEE--
So Guy Ritchie's not wrong, he's just not as right as he thinks he is.
Then again, what's right for Ritchie?
Is he trying to preach a distilled form of Kabbalah?
Is this the dramatization of a form of New Age therapy?
Or is everything I just said about this movie pulled entirely out of my ass?
Yeah, that's possible...
But why bother trying to look for subtext in a film that's built entirely out of text?
Forget the filmmaking, forget the storytelling, Revolver's real failing is that its meaning is too clear.
You are not your ego, destroy it.
It's a bumper sticker of a message.
And yes, there might be nuances to delve into there,
but honestly, I'm not sure Ritchie was mature enough to do that delving.
Ironically, maybe the only thing that's holding Guy Ritchie back is Guy Ritchie.
His own ego, his own devotion to style, his own language.
Hell, just the choice to tell this parable within the confines
of a straightforward gangster action shoot 'em up,
with all the macho puppiness, unnecessary body count, and stupid genre cliches it entails.
Because it's not that Kabbalah is a shallow philosophy,
it's being hampered by a shallow genre.
That said, this movie is hilarious in the worst way,
so if you're looking for a bad movie night, 0/10, highly recommended, would hatewatch again.
Checkmate
FEAR ME!
So...
Wanna watch a movie that's actually about Kabbalah?
♪ Tradition! Tradition! ♪
♪ Tradition! ♪
♪ Tradition! Tradition! ♪
♪ Tradition! ♪