One of RocknRolla’s entrenched problems is that the main plot has little to it; there isn’t really anything substantial about it. Nothing really feels like it has a point, none of the actions feel consequential, and as a whole, the film just sort of comes and goes without leaving much, if any, of a memorable stamp on your brain. The central plot element is the lucky painting of the Russian billionaire and the fact that it goes missing (but as we find out, it's actually stolen). It makes its way, much like the diamond from Snatch and the shotguns from Lock, Stock, from character to character while Wilkinson’s Lenny Cole searches for it. That’s it, that’s the plot and, yes, it’s as trivial as it sounds. Now this could have gone down just fine if the characters and dialogue were up to scratch, but the sad truth is they aren’t. After I saw his first two films I was quoting them pretty much from then on, Snatch in particular to this day, but there’s little dialogue in RocknRolla that I find myself being able to remember, never mind wanting to quote as I go about my day.
Something else which irritated me about RocknRolla was the fact that the money seems to have gone to Mr Ritchie’s head. Lock, Stock and Snatch had a gritty, low-budget feel about them which gave them a lot of their charm but here there has been far too much money spent, far too much. The whole thing has the glossy look of a laminated magazine, with a lot of the actors and set pieces feeling a bit too polished to be believable. There’s also a lot of miscasting going on; Butler sticks out like a sore thumb, Thandie Newton feels like she's in a completely different movie, and other minor characters are so minor that they really didn’t need to be played by the likes of Jeremy Piven or Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges. The cast side of things, however, isn’t completely devoid of worth with the likes of Idris Elba (who you may know from the TV show The Wire), Mark Strong (who is, well, one of the strongest attributes), and Toby Kebbell as our titular RocknRolla. That, along with a couple of impressive action sequences, saves the film from total lack of value.
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