By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders.
Revolver
Revolver is not your average Guy Ritchie movie. It does have the familiar British gangster elements, but it goes in a much more psychological direction. Without giving too much away… oh hell, Ritchie talks all about the twist so let him explain what he wanted you to get out of the film.
Ritchie Talks Revolver
"Let me just start from the idea that intrigued me, the concept of the film because the mind hates the concept of the film," said Ritchie. "I can’t remember the first person who brought the concept to me. I realized that my mind was trying to make it more complicated than what it actually was. The film is tremendously simple. It is simply that the only thing or entity you are battling is an eternal one it is that voice that when you are running keeps telling you to stop just when you start getting tired it is the ubiquitous voice that stops you from enjoying your life essentially and tricks you and seduces you. So that is the movie, right? It is not more complicated than that."
Jason Statham begins to go through the standard motions of getting revenge on the men who framed him. But is he really fighting them, or just his own ego? (It's his ego.) "Where the mind starts to make it complicated is when you really have to apply it and then the mind really makes sure that you don’t understand it and I suppose that is what I found most intriguing about the concept. You could clearly tell them [and] we tell them three times in the film [that] the film is about the fact that there is ultimately no such thing. Ultimately there is no major enemy, no external enemy so we say that three times and people are still going 'What is the film about?' That’s interesting because we told you three times."
Of course, you could just enjoy the fisticuffs and shootouts, but even Ritchie finds that hard to do. "I think that is up to the individual. I mean I tried to do that, I tried to make it so, but what happened is that I found that people got so pissed off about the fact that they don’t understand it that they weren’t interested in it as a gangster movie. What happened was they said, 'I don’t understand it and now I’m angry.' Some people didn’t have that reaction, but some people went bananas and they got really upset about it and so pretty swiftly after that the gangster aspect was reduced and it was 'What is the film about?' So I like to think that you can enjoy it on that basis, but what gets in the way is that if you don’t understand it then you can get angry."
For the American cut, Ritchie closed the film with some interviews with psychiatrists to help viewers out. "This is a slightly different cut than the one we released a few years ago or whenever it was because they found that it was too complicated. I expected some people to understand what the theme was about and there weren’t many that did so we thought well what we’ll do is put a bunch of psychiatrists at the end who could explain that it was about something."
Revolver opens to theaters December 7th.
For the trailer, posters, stills, more movie info and updates, go to the Revolver Movie Page.
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