See Snatch

When Tarantino rocked the indie film world and dorm rooms across America back in 1994 with Pulp Fiction, pop culture suddenly became obsessed with its own irreverent style. Future indulgences in violence and pulp could be just as humorous and ironic as they were seriously grim. We got hitmen and gangsters, anal rape and severed ears-all in good fun, we were assured. What Tarantino brought to the revived fascination in the badass was a sexiness as cheeky as it was seductive and powerful. It didn't just glorify violence, but made it hip and cool in its very exploitation and celebration of that would-be criminal in all of us.

Seven years later, we still sift through the debris of the Pulp Fiction explosion, from Christopher McQuarrie's bulletfest Way of the Gun earlier this year to this week's Snatch, a attempted follow-up to Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. That film was a surprisingly amusing exercise, in which Ritchie essentially threw a whole pile of funky crime clichés into a hyperkinetic film blender, left the top off, hit frappé, and snickered when all the s--- hit the wall.

There's really little more to tell about this new movie, except that it has something to do with boxing, a diamond, a squeaking dog and the notable additions of Brad Pitt, Dennis Farina and Benicio Del Toro, apparently to soothe our dainty American sensibilities. Plenty is going on for the attention span-deficient, with plot and character arcs taking back seats to Ritchie's prime concerns of scene flow and tough-guy posturing. And there's lots of that. All these guys have cool names and funny accents (Pitt's is literally indecipherable) and violently unique ways of taking care of whatever business they may have. I won't lie and say that it didn't appeal to the pulp fiend within me, because let's face it, it is fun to watch a lot of guys-who would cause me to evacuate my bowels if I ever met them in person-tear each other to bloody bits.

What's missing, though, isn't just style, because Ritchie's camerawork and dialogue are overloaded with tricks and attitude. Rather, Ritchie misses out on what still makes Tarantino fun-that criminals, antiheroes, scum, whatever you call them, should be sexy. Whether a hulking Marcellus Wallace or a sickly grinning Michael Madsen, these guys are masculine because of their violence, not the other way around. Ritchie is concerned with only a superficial show of male posturing, and while Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels got away with its masturbatory wham-bams due to its sheer spirit, Snatch feels a little soggy.

What is most mystifying is how this guy Ritchie, who seems to have no ounce of real sexuality in all that oozing testosterone, can be hitched to Madonna. The irony of the big kahuna of all sex symbols ultimately ending up with a boy so stubbornly fixated on seeing men playing with each other's glorified appen-dages is almost too much to bear. Still, it's funny to meditate on Tarantino and Madonna in the same review. Now there's one twisted Oedipal nugget of pop fantasy for you-the Queen Mother of Pop Culture, and its Prodigal Son: together in pulp bliss.