So, where did it all go wrong for Guy Ritchie?

He's worth millions. He's married to Madonna. He lives the life of a country gent. He hangs out with Hollywood royalty. And he can make any film he wants...

He gains confidence, and even attempts a grin of sorts as his RP lurches into mockney at the end of the sentence. He is appealing to the lads-mag readers who still love him for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Beneath his heart-rending plea for cash and cool lies the subtext of a man begging the boys down the pub to club together and prevent him from being consistently outshone by the missus.

It can't be easy, being married to the most famous woman on the planet. Especially for somebody who has always craved a pop-culture credibility of his own. But if the gender roles were reversed, you couldn't image a woman playing the same "c'mon girls, help me out here" card. Just imagine Posh Spice appealing to the sisterhood: "Please buy my album, I know it's rubbish, but I need the money and the kudos - it's very hard on me just being Mrs Beckham."

Ritchie's half-hearted SOS to cinema-goers is unlikely to help him. Seldom has so much media attention been devoted to drubbing a relatively minor movie. The critics have already labelled Revolver "a stodgy, expensive revenge movie with a pompous belief in its own brilliance". This paper's reviewer, Anthony Quinn, found the gangster film plumbed "new standards of dreadfulness". "It's convoluted past the point of rationality," wrote The Daily Telegraph's film critic. "Its boring, impenetrable, overbearing script leaves the viewer drained." The Guardian dismissed the film's director as "an overgrown public schoolboy with the worst fake hard-boy accent this side of Tim Westwood".

And it's not just the film buffs and columnists who find Ritchie a figure of ridicule. It's the punters too. Guy and Madonna were booed as they arrived at the Leicester Square premiere on Tuesday, although he later claimed this was because the couple disappointed fans by not posing for enough pictures.

Where did it all go wrong for Guy Ritchie? Seven years ago he was going to restore the edge to commercial British cinema. "Lock Stock definitely blazed a certain kind of cinema trail," says Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound magazine. "It had a kind of comic invention, and it very much fitted the late-Nineties era of the lad mag and this rediscovery of 'masculine pursuits'. It was followed by a stream of British gangster movies which were almost all rather bad."

James talks about how Ritchie brought his experience of making pop videos and television commercials to the big screen. "Lock Stock promoted the idea that you could make films the way you could make rock music: instantaneously. This was just after Tony Blair's idea of 'Cool Britannia'. Around Soho there was the idea that this was going to reinvigorate London-based films, and it might have done. Instead what we got was a huge glut of very poor films which we've been suffering for ever since. The enthusiasm we had has been exhausted."

The Ritchie comet seemed to soar to stratospheric levels when he was introduced to Madonna during a celebrity soirée at Sting and Trudie Styler's house (Styler having been involved in the production of Lock Stock). He married the material girl in December of 2000, the same year that saw the release of Snatch: another laddish crime caper which scraped back its investment largely due to the box-office guarantee of starring roles from Hollywood's Benicio del Toro and Brad Pitt. Pitt, who played a "pikey", caravan-dwelling bare-knuckle boxer, gushed over Ritchie's directorial genius in interviews. Revealing the influence of Ritchian mockney slang, Pitt told interviewers that he was hoping for the director "to reinvent the Western. I think he's tits".

It was around this time that Madonna fans started to find Ritchie annoying. The diva, long-regarded as a feminist icon, took to wearing jackets emblazoned with her husband's name and T-shirts slashed at the cleavage promoting his films.

I remember a psychologist friend of mine observing that Ritchie's films "seemed to be made by a man who hates women. He's all about a violent, squalid world in which men grab each other's balls [there's a testicle-crunching scene in Lock Stock and a genital stabbing in Snatch]. What is he doing married to a woman whose career has been based on female emancipation? Why on earth is she so publicly, ridiculously hitching her credibility to his?"

She went one further when she starred in his straight-to-video flop Swept Away, a remake of the 1975 Italian succès de scandale in which a forceful modern woman enjoyed being slapped around by a primitive man. Madonna's film career has, of course, been relatively risible since she got into the groove in 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan. We turned a blind eye. But audiences find unsuccessful "couple" movies too icky to forgive (witness Bennifer's tarring and feathering over Gigli).

Madonna has always been a magpie. She has incorporated slabs of Monroe, Dietrich, gay disco, cowboy glitter, trance and pornography into her constant reinvention. Likewise, Ritchie pilfered - with rather less wit and poise - from Tarantino and Scorsese and Fight Club's David Fincher. But when two such style-snatchers collaborate, the derivatives are compounded and image created by two people standing on the shoulders of so many is always in danger of toppling.

Being married to Madonna also made Ritchie's biography a fact of public record. We found out that, rather than being the barrow boy he camped up, he was in fact the stepson of baronet Sir Michael Leighton and a descendant of King Edward I. "There's something very phoney about him," says James. It is interesting to observe the union of a posh boy pretending to be working class, and the Michigan engineer's daughter currently trying on her best Penelope Keith act as though she were to the manor born.

Some have speculated that we tired of Madonna once she moved to our country and started zipping around London in her Mini. But it wasn't the proximity of the star we objected to. It was the fact that she wanted us off her lawn. Although she liked to be pictured clucking sweetly to her chickens and then blasting away at the pheasants, we didn't like being denied the right to ramble over her 1,200-acre estate, Ashcombe House on the Wiltshire-Dorset border. Then she offended Ritchie's target audience, the British working class, by accusing them of, well, not working. "I'm used to people in America working seven days a week," she flounced. "It's highly irritating. They leave work at five - and there are bank holidays every minute here. When you hire an employee here, they remind you that they get four weeks' paid vacation."

We also had a problem with her affiliation with the Kabbalah Centre in London, which sells gullible folk miracle water (priced at £45 for 12 bottles) from its £3.65m HQ on Bond Street. Founded by former insurance salesman, Rabbi Philip Berg, the Centre markets Kabbalah as a "universal system for self-improvement", and is based on the interpretation of ancient Hebrew texts in a search for meaning and numbers, and is said to be impenetrable by all but advanced Jewish scholars.

It is possible that this mystical practice had an influence on the plot of Revolver. Sony Films is reported to have withdrawn support when Ritchie refused to tone down the religious references. In the Sun interview, Ritchie explains that the names of characters in the film "correspond to colours and colours to numbers". Which puts me in mind of the cast of Reservoir Dogs spending an afternoon down the bingo hall. The movie's hero, Jason, has spent seven years in prison and is now back to humiliate those responsible for his incarceration. "It's about the correlation between the corporation, the confidence trick, the game and warfare," he says. "One man's crime is another man's vocation. There's a simple formula that they all have to follow to extract what they want."

The reviews indicate that Ritchie would have been better off following a simple formula himself, rather than miring his characters in an unconvincing and absurdly convoluted tale. Revolver took him three years to write. Snatch took only three months. "I get the impression that he would have been better off making a straight genre film," says James. Then again, James thinks he's lucky to have been able to make any film at all after Swept Away. "Most directors find it's one strike and they're out. Ritchie's been in a very privileged position. Then again, I've heard rumours that he wasn't around very much during the filming of Lock Stock and just left people to get on with things. The team that made Ritchie's first film included Matthew Vaughn, who went on to make the proficient gangster film Layer Cake. So it may be that he was the talented one all along."

Certainly, since that first brief buzz of excitement, Ritchie has done little but disappoint cinema-goers. Indeed, his career might now be summed up in the words of Tom from Lock Stock: "There's no money, there's no weed. It's all been replaced by a fucking big pile of corpses."