“Snatch” turns 10

With a playful, Yiddish melody as accompaniment, four Hasidic men enter a Jewish diamond depository. Security monitors follow their progress as one of them lectures on the Septuagint mistranslation of the Hebrew word young woman for virgin.  “It’s a nice story,” he says, referring to Catholicism’s apparent false prophecy.

Arriving at their destination, the camera abruptly zooms in on the leader as he tears off his tallit to reveal four handguns.  Overseer’s big beat electronica explodes in jolting, sonic cadence and the screen turns to contorting, quick-flash imagery. The Orthodox impostors scream, thrash, threaten, pistol-whip, besiege, and steal an 84-carat diamond.

This is Snatch in all its gritty splendor: humor, adrenaline, hyperbolic characters, imaginative camerawork, and really, really good music. The British film, written and directed by Guy Ritchie and produced by Matthew Vaughn, is as funny, emotionally-charged, and aggressive today as when it was first released in the U.K., ten years ago this week.

A decade ago, movie critics wrote that Ritchie achieved little more than rehashing the actors, genre, nonlinear twist, and editing technique of his previous, low-budget indie hit, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (LSTSB) (1998).

What they didn’t realize is that, despite the earlier accomplishments of the comparable Pulp Fiction (1994), and Trainspotting (1996), Snatch would ultimately join a select group of films that many studios, producers, writers, and aspiring students would look to for stylistic reference.

Despite the similarities to other of its contemporaries Snatch managed to distance itself, not with a stronger story, better effects or a significantly more dynamic cast, but because it didn’t seem to take itself quite as seriously.

The film’s levity was fresh and sincere, and to many adoring Americans in particular, the cockneyfied grayness of lower-class England and its criminal underground still came off enviably cooler than anything they’d seen before.

And, to the film’s benefit, Ritchie was more inspired by music than anything, which is why the soundtrack and other audio effects, in conjunction with creative visual editing, became the driving force behind the film’s emotional core.

Brad Pitt’s  “pikey” was riotous, deadly, and timelessly cool as shit.  But his most compelling scenes – which were also the movie’s – were with limited or no dialogue.

Massive Attack’s mercurial trip-hop haunted the audience while the restrained Mickey struggled in enraged, slow motion horror as he watched his mother perish in a fire. Klint, who also produced the film’s now classic title song “Diamond,” provided an affecting, power chord-heavy instrumental as backdrop to the twisting and blurring stop-motion visuals of the funeral.  And the film’s climax – the final boxing scene and pikey’s retribution – simply wouldn’t have been possible without Oasis’ Zeppelin-esque hard drums and heavy guitars knocking it to the stars.

Ultimately, Ritchie and Vaughn knew how to connect with their peers. Members of their own Generation X – at the time in their late teens to late thirties– were distinctly familiar with the seemingly limitless expressionism associated with music video culture.  They responded positively to what was introduced in LSTSB and solidified with the more prolific and star-studded Snatch.

Traits of those successes can be seen in subsequent works as early as Ocean’s 11 (2001) – with its title sequence, character introduction, and particular use of a witty, East End London, rhyming slang character – and as recent as the movie trailer for The Losers (2010).

Even the television series The Good Guys (2010) borrows heavily from what made Snatch popular. It shares similar swipe screen and freeze-frame imagery, irregular timelines, a funny, retro protagonist, embellished criminal characters, and classic rock songs as the driving force behind each episode’s main action sequence.

Ironically, Ritchie and Vaughn weren’t so lucky in their individual attempts to carry on the stylized genre that made them popular.  Layer Cake (2004), Revolver (2005) and RocknRolla (2008) were all met with mixed reviews.

However, they redeveloped an international following by stepping away from the typical contemporary crime drama while keeping the amazing dynamism of visual and auditory storytelling.

Vaughn directed and produced Kick-Ass (2010), a critically acclaimed Mark Millar comic book adaptation that is as raucous, hilarious, and shamelessly R-rated as his earliest works.

Ritchie struck cinematic gold with Sherlock Holmes (2009). Aided by a superstar actor portraying the legendary fictional character, he brilliantly stayed true to his roots with flashback sequences, stunning, contorting and slow-motion visual editing and even bare-knuckle boxing.

For the past ten years, Snatch has been more than an occasional respite from what was, in many ways, a surreal decade. It was confirmation that LSTSB wasn’t a fluke, and that Ritchie and Vaughn were bonafide filmmakers.

Admittedly, Snatch isn’t for everyone with its violence, explicit language, and Bechdel test-failing abundance of testosterone. In its celluloid format, it may seem less-than-nostalgic to those permanently adamant about high definition viewing.

For many, however, its game-changing outrageousness, incredible sequences, and memorable music have proved entertainingly ageless – and a combination that continues to be successful today.