Throwback: ‘Snatch’ Was The Best Movie Of 2000

Just hear me out. I’m well aware that 2000 is also the same year Traffic, Gladiator, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? debuted. I’m also aware that it won no notable awards and that I’ve already revisited Guy Ritchie’s first film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which is often the subject matter for criticizing the director about following his own filmmaking formula to a tee twice in a row. That being said, as a stand-alone film, there is no movie like Snatch, and it was—hands-down—the coolest, most fun comedy of the year that just happened to be one of the most brilliantly edited pieces of film in the aughts.

Snatch tells the story of a bunch of amateur crooks chasing after an 84-carat diamond. The script is confusing, even with the narration from Turkish. There are a dozen or so main characters, all with separate agendas but who are connected one way or another. If you need a refresher:

Jason Statham plays Turkish, an illegal boxing promoter who works with his partner, Tommy (Stephen Graham). The two end up in a deal with Brick Top (Alan Ford), a terrifying mob boss who controls all of the boxing bookies and the outcomes of the fights through bribery. He bribes Turkish to have his massive fighter, Gorgeous George, take a dive.

When buying a new caravan off a bunch of gypsies, Turkish and Tommy meet their ringleader, Mickey (Brad Pitt), a sinewy lad who shocks everyone by dropping Gorgeous George with his bare hands during a scuffle. Turkish and Tommy seem to have found a new fighter.

Meanwhile, gambling degenerate Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro) steals a priceless diamond and he’s on his way back to New York to split the worth with Cousin Avi (Dennis Farina), but is unaware the Russian mob is on his tail. While the Russians are going after the diamond, it ends up in the hands of a couple of amateur bank robbers whose unpredictable pup likes to eat things it shouldn’t, including sneaky toys and jewels.

Instead of revisiting any nostalgic feelings Snatch gave us upon release almost 15 years ago, here’s a breakdown of why it became a modern day cult classic, why it was ignored by Hollywood big wigs, and why Guy Ritchie can never pull it off again.

1:30: After the cold open introducing Turkish and Tommy, Ritchie jumps right into the heist. Franky Four Fingers and his crew of Russians pose as Hassidic Jews and friends of the owner of the jewelry vault. What makes the scene so jarring is we’re as taken off guard as the victims when Four Fingers and company start gutting the place. The whole sequence is shown through surveillance monitors, giving the audience the feeling they’re in on something — when in fact they’re just as in the dark as the vault workers.

2:00: Ritchie is a huge fan of the freeze frame. Loves it. Speeding up frames, slowing them down, and then freezing is signature Ritchie, a trait both praised and criticized of the director. If you hadn’t seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels before Snatch, you were in for a treat, but if you had, you were probably like, “Really though? He couldn’t have changed it up just a little bit?”

3:00: Three minutes in we meet Brick Top, the most repulsive character in the whole film. Why? He feeds his victims to pigs. Later on, he delivers the creepiest, yet most informative movie quote ever:

“You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sievin’ through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, ‘as greedy as a pig.'”

7:00: What makes Snatch a cult classic other than the dialogue, the perfect ensemble, and a camera that never sat still was the editing. Editor Jon Harris was nominated for an Oscar for 127 Hours, but he went unnoticed ten years earlier for his work on Snatch, which is a downright shame. Harris’s editing threw people for a loop, and his touch is precisely what makes Snatch distinctively different from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. So critics can shove it.

20:00: Forget about Thelma & Louise and never mind Fight Club, Brad Pitt looked his absolute best in Snatch. Pitt was perfect for the role of Mickey and was laugh-out-loud funny thanks to his inaudible Irish/English/gypsy dialect and madman persona. After Mickey drops Gorgeous George in a bare-knuckle fight, Turkish and Tommy take him on to help rig Brick Top’s big fight. Only Mickey doesn’t listen and it ends up getting his mom killed.

23:50: Another example of Ritchie’s play on the surveillance shot.

1:05:00: Why did the Academy snub Snatch? It was too goofy. It was brilliant, expertly crafted, violent, and super fun, but it was too upbeat and offbeat for Hollywood’s liking, despite the appearance by golden boy Brad Pitt. The same year brought us Gladiator, an Oscar-winning epic, as well as Traffic, another layered crime film that peaked into the international war on drugs in a way that was never fictionalized on screen before. These two films, along with O Brother, Where At Thou?, shooed away any competition that year. Even though O Brother is considered a comedy, the sophistication of the Coen Brothers raises the stakes and Ritchie just wasn’t known well enough overseas at the time.

Comedies rarely get the awards attention they deserve, even when they’re visual gold. Despite having two major films lined up for 2015 and 2016, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and King Arthur, Ritchie will never be able to replicate something like Snatch again. Not because he already attempted to do so with RocknRolla, which failed commercially and critically, but because he was swindled into making mega-budget blockbusters like Sherlock Holmes. He’ll never have the same freedom he had while making Snatch and nothing he directs these will have the organic grit of his first two features. Snatch is a time capsule of cool; though it didn’t take home any major awards, it might not have the cult following it does today if it had.

Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!

Photos: Screen Gems/Everett Collection