Mr. Chess

Chess is mentioned in just about all his movies, as well as Jason Statham’s.

Guy Ritchie’s Revolver fires blanks
Posted By Jake Coyle

If a spoiler alert is needed for a panel of real-life psychiatrists, consider yourself forewarned.

That’s how Guy Ritchie’s Revolver ends: With a series of brief clips of psychiatrists explaining the difference between the id and ego. Not exactly the Death Star exploding, is it?

Our experts have nothing directly to do with the plot, but they’re there to help explain the mess of a movie that has preceded them. Revolver is a hard-boiled crime flick with its mayhem aimed at the inner workings of the mind.

It’s filled with constant inner monologues, Machiavelli quotes and enough chess theory to make Bobby Fischer blush. All of this makes up the subtext to Revolver, which is otherwise the usual style-over-substance theatrics of Ritchie, whose films include Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch – but who is best known as Mr. Material Girl.

Jake Green (Jason Statham) is a con man who has been released from prison after seven years of solitary confinement. Somehow during this period, through some type of prison-wall osmosis, he’s been schooled by his jailed neighbours on the art of war, deception and chess.

“Dangerous combination, chess and cons,” intones Green, leaving unsaid the lethal concoction of Boggle and blackmailers.

Here is the full story.