Rocknrolla (15)

After the mauling he received for Swept Away and Revolver, one wondered if Guy Ritchie ever experienced a dark night of the soul and felt tempted to jack in the film-making lark altogether.

Credit to the lad, he keeps bouncing back, and RocknRolla returns him to the violent caper comedy on which he made his name. Set in a lately prosperous London of foul-mouthed mobsters, petty crooks, thieving junkies and dodgy accountants, it illustrates a paradoxical principle that fast-paced storytelling can still drag very slowly indeed.

The McGuffin in the middle concerns the whereabouts of a "lucky painting" that is loaned to a criminal overlord (Tom Wilkinson) by a Russian plutocrat, who's being ripped off by a pair of lowlife jack-the-lads. But Ritchie is so busy making his characters cool and street-smart that he neglects to make any of them very interesting, and despite some top-drawer actors – Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, and Toby Kebbell as Wilkinson's glamorously wasted rock-star stepson – there is dismayingly little in this frenetic jumble of narratives to hold our attention.

Ritchie is handy with the whiplash editing that makes fast-cutting almost subliminal, and his three-second sex scene between Gerard Butler and Thandie Newton – a neat montage of groans, swoons and zips – made me laugh. But his writing skills just aren't up to scratch, evidenced in set-piece monologues of inexcusable banality. His fortitude under critical flak is admirable, and his self-confidence unbelievable, but RocknRolla is the same old shaggy-dog story with a slightly different variety fleas.