US TV

In the US: Season 1 available on Crackle

Guy Ritchie is the sort of director who wants not nuffin to do with not none of that auteur theory. That’s lardy dah, ponces’ talk, that is.

Yet you can spot a Guy Ritchie movie a mile off, innit? You got the hypermasculinity and the sexual objectification of women, ain’t ya? You’ve got the obsession with and eulogisation of working class, English crims – the kind that only someone ultra-posh who’s the son of a baronet has, right? You’ve got the casting of proper working class, hard actors, who hopefully are crims, too. You’ve got the slow-mo, you’ve got the rhyming slang, you’ve got the monickers, and you’ve got the stylisation that lets the audience know it’s not quite for real, that it’s all just a bit off from real-life – that it’s all just a bit of bantosaurus rexing.

Case in point, guv’nor – like anyone in London’s used guv’nor seriously since The Sweeney – is Snatch, Guy Ritchie’s 2000 movie about a diamond heist and a ‘pikey’ boxer (Brad Pitt). Bants and sexual objectification right there in the title ‘cos it has a double meaning, don’t it? And all as authentically East End as the Islington filming locations.

So what happens when you take the auteur out of the auteured, which is what we now have with Crackle’s Snatch? You get something as soft as a soufflé, that’s what.

Owing almost nothing beyond its general feel to the original movie, it sees Luke Pasqualino (born: Peterborough) playing the Cockney son of notorious banged-up Cockney bank robber Dougray Scott (born: Glenrothes). He’s doing his best to pay off the debts, but his get-rich schemes with posh boy Ruper Grint (born: Harlow) aren’t working and the local Cockney lone shark’s going to take his Cockney mum’s flower shop off him if he doesn’t pay up – and quick.

So he puts everything they have on a fight involving his ‘half-pikey’, half-Cockney boxing star Lucien Laviscount (born: Burnley). Except that makes everything worse. 

Fortunately, Cockney moll Phoebe Dynevor (born: Manchester) is still miffed at Cockney Cuban-wannabe Ed Westwick (born: Stevenage) for taking her share of the takings at his club, so enlists them in a cunning scheme to rob Westwick that should help Pasqualino, Grint and Laviscount make thirty grand, easy. It just involves a heist…

Now, not for a second does any of this ring true, from the Manchester filming locations masquerading as the East End because the East End doesn’t look like the East End any more through the wobbly accents through the idea that Pasqualino is in any way related to Scott through the action scenes through the amiable Cockney geezers that populate this florist-envying underworld through the laughable prison Scott’s banged up in through every other thing that happens in the show.

But unlike Ritchie’s Snatch, which was clearly sending itself up while simultaneously worshipping at its East End altar, this Snatch clearly half-believes in its nonsensical vision of the E postcodes that would make EastEnders seem like a Ken Loach documentary. Not totally, but the self-satire has been very clearly bleached out of the formula. Some of the cast are even taking it all seriously.

It’s also a very pale imitation of Ritchie’s style. Snatch seems to get bored of trying anything visually exciting after the title sequence, after which it’s business as usual. There’s very little humour, Laviscount is completely comprehensible, and the minimal action in the show fails to excite even slightly. In the least Ritchian move possible, Dynevor even gets lines, character and motivation, while never having to take even some of her clothes off. Not once.

However, as Dynevor and indeed most of the cast seem to be about 15 years old, playing dress-up in a modern-day, London-based Bugsy Malone, that’s not such a bad thing.

And yet… there’s still a grudging “not bad” quality to it. Sure, writer/creator Alex De Rakoff (The Calcium Kid, Dead Man Running) is British, the cast are British, Rupert Grint is an executive producer and it’s filmed in Britain. But this is Crackle, a US internet network, not BBC Three.

Sure, there’s a token American supporting character (Stephanie Leonidas from Defiance – ironically, the only member of the cast who is born: London), but there are no lingustic concessions, no forced explanations for dialogue or settings. It’s probably the most authentically British TV show made for a US network that I’ve ever seen. It’s just that for Brits, it’s not properly pukka, y’know?

If you like weak, semi-comedic crime dramas, Snatch might work for you. If you want to see Rupert Grint doing something a bit different from Harry Potter for a change, it’s worth a punt.

But if you’re a fan of the original movie, a fan of Guy Ritchie or – heaven forfend – a proper Londoner, born and bred, best to steer clear of this one, me old china and head out for a cheeky Nando’s instead.