Word: plot
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...Hawk Down that he knows how to detonate suspense in the bazaar of political ideas. More important, Body of Lies is based on David Ignatius' best seller, which casts Ferris as a good-guy hero, firmly in the spy-novel tradition, and makes him the agent of a devious plot that could just about save the world...
...rich banquet of personalities; it's what readers sign up for. But ratiocination isn't welcome in modern movies, which prefer visceral impact over intellect. Not that the film should kowtow to ignorance--only that it might have streamlined the dramatis personae, the better to concentrate on the plot...
...plot is about some high-paid London lowlifes and a missing "lucky painting." But the real suspense surrounding Guy Ritchie's RockNRolla is this: Can the writer-director return to his early form and fame - when his debut feature Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels made him the hot young bloke - and emerge from the career burden of being Mr. Madonna? It's got to be time-consuming, and reputation-deflating, for a distinctive filmmaker to be dodging the paparazzi, shopping for a baby in Malawi and enduring gossip that your wife is palling around with A-Rod. Simply finding time...
...Once again Ritchie needs a narrator to set the tone and occasionally explain the plot machinations to slower members of the audience. His name is Archie (incarnated with just the right mix of menace and mystery by go-to Brit character actor Mark Strong), and at the beginning he helpfully deciphers the movie's title: a higher, more voracious strain of London gangster. "We all like a bit of the good life: some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour or the fame. But a rocknrolla, oh, he's different. Why? Because a real rocknrolla wants...
...first the director has eyes on a remake, or an updating, of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with either Robert Downey Jr. or Russell Crowe as the drug-using supersleuth of 221B Baker Street. Count on Ritchie to find pungent thuggery in foggy London town and to juice up the plot with Victorian-age rocknrollas...