film: RocknRolla Vs Igor

What do you do if you’ve got so many films to review that you haven’t seen daylight for 4 days. Your red bull supply has dried up, the pro plus are a distant but crazy memory and your eyes are prized awake by matchsticks. The answer is simple my friends. Load up on quadruple espressos and review 2 films at once. This is a terrible idea.

You couldn’t get 2 more different films than RocknRolla and kid’s animation, Igor. Put it like this. If Little Johnny sat through just half-an-hour of Guy Ritchie’s homage to London’s East End, he’d require a good year of therapy with Dr Finkelstein.

In Rock’n’rolla minor crooks One Two and Handsome Bob are forced to steal money in order to fix gangster Lenny Cole. But their plans are complicated by a Russian oligarch and the appearances of Lenny’s drug addicted rock’n’rolla son Johnny Quid.

Now whilst Rock’N’Rolla examines the role of crime in London’s underbelly, Igor examines the nature of evil in a fictitious country called Malaria. Whereas Rock’N’Rolla charts the journey of two junior criminals…Igor charts the journey of Igor, a junior servant with a big hunchback and bigger heart.
AND While Rock’n’roll’s lackies work for hardman Lenny Cole, Igor toils for a dodgy evil scientist, but wishes he could be the 1 creating his own evil experiments.. You see, I knew this would be easy.

Laughable as it may sound RockNRolla and Igor do actually share a great deal in common. The most obvious comparison is that both pictures are positively awash with entertaining lowlifes, scoundrels and miscreants. Indeed, there’s barely a character in either movie that couldn’t do with a long stretch on the baddie step. Igor most notably boasts Eddie Izzard’s Dr Shadenfrede, who must surely take the soggy biscuit for being the campest heterosexual lothario since Rupert Everett’s Prince Charming from Shrek.

But for sure fire grab villainous fire power, you actually can’t put a steel capped step wrong in Rock’n’rolla. This movie might have the best collection of villains since GoodFellas, and that’s saying something. Gerard Butler and Tom Hardy add a delicious dose of comic relief as bickering buddies One Two and Handsome Bob, whilst Karel Roden’s Russian mobster is amusingly reminiscent of one Roman Abramovich. But for sheer absolute bad ass bliss, I must doff my cap to Tom Wilkinson. His performance as menacing mafia gangster Lenny Cole is one of the best I’ve seen over the last year.

Now the thing is… It’s not just the rag tag collection of villains that connect Rock’n’rolla and Igor. We’ve also got 2 coming of age stories on our plates here. Igor’s phycially awkward ascendence from hunched servant to celebrated inventor is charming, but largely in a way that we’ve seen before in Disney fare such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And in an eery parralel with Wall-E there’s also a clumsily rendered love story with a monosyllabic creation called Eve.

But once again Rock’N’Rolla delivers stronger material here, with a gripping subplot involving drug addict come musician Johnny Quid. A sort of East End Hamlet, the character must not only confront his problems with substances, but also face up to his father in a well-executed final act. Actor Toby Kebbell steals the show with his performance here, a heady cocktail of sinew, apathy and existential angst.

But it’s ultimately a question of heritage that makes these films live or die. Igor’s gothic themes and pervasive sense of mischief are clearly indebted to the school of Tim Burton, but somehow lack the authenticity of the dark lord himself. Rock’n’rolla, meanwhile, looks and sounds a lot like a Guy Ritchie movie. But, and here’s the good news, it’s reminiscent of a good Guy Ritchie film as opposed to some of the guff from the last 4 years. The upshot? Look past a slightly fluffy first half an hour and RockNRoll is 4 stars. Igor, meanwhile is only worth 2. Goodbye.

For the best of the rest:

Igor:

Timeout:
‘I’d rather be a good nobody than an evil somebody’ is the mantra for this undistinguished animated Frankenstein comedy spin-off. Igor is one of many identical-looking hunchbacks who aid the kingdom of Malaria’s evil scientists with their wicked inventions. Igor (voiced by John Cusack) has a face like Peter Lorre and a demeanour far removed from his master, Dr Glickenstein (John Cleese). He’s also more intelligent than his fellow hunchbacks.

The Times Online:
In the kingdom of Malaria, government-sponsored mad scientists compete to create threatening devices that can be used to blackmail the rest of the world. Each scientist - including Dr Schadenfreude (voiced by Izzard) - is assisted by a hunchbacked minion generically named Igor. But Cusack’s assistant aspires to become a scientist himself, much to the displeasure of the rest of the evil science community. When his boss Dr Glickenstein (Cleese) is killed, Igor takes over the laboratory and creates a hulking but sweet female monster who, for want of a better gag, dreams of being cast in Annie.

Rock’n'Rolla:

Twitch:
Well, glory be, Guy Ritchie is back and back in a big way. His debut film, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, branded Ritchie the brash young wunderkind of Brit film; Snatch, for its part, confirmed his place as the patron of the punters and thugs. His films were bold, stylish, hyper-violent sned ups of UK crime culture, painting a vivid picture of a world where everyone was on the take, where everybody had an angle. Ritchie was indisputably the best in the world at what he did, the absolute king of his particular niche, and it seemed like there was nowhere to go but up.

The Guardian:
That title of Mr Guy Ritchie’s new featcha. Means geeza. Or mobsta. Top bruisa. In his London manna. Sad to say, the film’s a shocka. A right depressa. Bit of a dispirita. For this directa, it ain’t exactly a departcha. And the title means as well as everything else Mr Ritchie’s become a dodgy spella. What a dismaying orthographical decline since his last pictcha. Which we must now think of as Revolva. This was influenced by the belief system known as Kabbala. Rememba? Espoused by his spouse, whose name may originally have been spelt “Madonner”.