Guy Fawked Up

Watching Guy Ritchie's Revolver will make you want to pour petrol on your head and set fire to yourself. And not in a good way

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You know that things are looking bad for a movie when a Sky News camera crew doorsteps you as you come out of the press show and asks you to tell them just how much you hated it. This was the unappetising treat which greeted UK critics exiting from a Monday morning Leicester Square screening of Guy Ritchie's Revolver, a film whose disastrous Toronto Film Festival debut had prompted a resounding raspberry.

A thorough mauling in 'Variety', who announced that the "all style, no content" hack had attempted to "get serious" but wound up "shooting a blank" was just the beginning of a deluge of lousy notices: indeed, by the time you read this column, Revolver will probably have gone down in history as one of the worst reviewed British films of the decade, up there with Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. 'The Guardian' ran their review early, thereby maximising the impact of a critical kicking which concluded that "Swept Away now looks like Citizen Kane" by comparison.

Meanwhile, on the BBC's flagship movie programme 'Film 2005', Jonathan Ross pointedly failed to review the movie at all, presumably out of politeness to Ritchie, who he had just interviewed. As for me, even if I'd wanted to speak to the news crew outside that screening (which I didn't) I really wouldn't have been able to say anything; frankly, short of pouring petrol on my head and setting fire to myself, nothing could have conveyed the way I felt about having just spent two hours inside the mind of Guy Ritchie.

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