RocknRolla (15)

In one of the more likeable touches in RocknRolla, one of Guy Ritchie's underworld types reveals a fondness for watching DVDs: what else but The Remains of the Day and Pride & Prejudice? It's a cheeky reminder that in British cinema, there are only two genres that really count: posh period drama and rough-and-ready gangland thriller.

These two are yin and yang – equally despised by film buffs, equally revealing about British culture. One genre is essentially female, the other obsessively male; one patrician, the other as proletarian as pie (at least, both aspire to be). One is nostalgically fixated on rigid social etiquette, yet often surprisingly open to aesthetic variation; the other favours social flux and rule-breaking, yet is itself ossified into a set of creaky tropes. So of course you can't help wishing the directors involved would occasionally swap roles: if only James Ivory would get down and dirty with some toe-rags from Poplar, or the Earl of Ritchie would bring his garrulous talk-over style to, say, this week's 18th-century biopic, with Keira Knightley stepping grandly under a range of towering coiffures: "Meet the Duchess ... Duchess of High Barnet most likely, with all that hair."

But, for a change, Ritchie is managing all right on his own turf. After the deliriously incoherent Revolver, he's back on old form – which isn't saying much if you don't particularly like that form. But there's no denying that Ritchie is an auteur. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying he's foreign or nuffink. But his tics and devices have become so consistent that they have gelled into an entirely idiosyncratic system.

The plot of RocknRolla boils down to the peculiar quasi-mathematical formula that is arguably Ritchie's true signature touch. To wit: x (all- powerful Mr Big) wants y (slightly less powerful gang lord) to retrieve z (missing McGuffin); y sends minion a after z, which is in the hands of b (dodgy loose cannon) – and if you're looking for b, the bloke you need to talk to is c (peripheral bit player, but chance for tasty cameo from member of Ritchie's plug-ugly pool). In RocknRolla, x = Russian billionaire, any resemblance to R*m**Abr*m*vich entirely coincidental; y = Tom Wilkinson's 'orrible old-school mobster; z = stolen painting; and c ... actually, I can't remember who c is, which is exactly what I mean about the formula being peculiar.

The other consistent Ritchie trope is his faith in appearance. The characters he despises are those who pass as respectable, although they're as sleazy as the rest. But a thug who looks like a thug is all right in Ritchie's book, and there's nothing he respects more than a scarred face, a few missing teeth and a cheeky wink. You know where you are with people who wear their inner nature plastered on their gob. In this sense, he's a true Dickensian.

RocknRolla is as frenziedly macho as ever, with Thandie Newton the token woman in a blasé posh-totty role. But the maleness takes a bizarre new twist: one Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy) reveals that he's gay and yearning for the attentions of his best mate, hard man One Two (Gerard Butler): One Two panics, Bob hangs his head, then they ruefully share a slow dance. Has Guy's missus only just introduced him to her gay friends, or what? So hysterical is the homophobia that it comes round full circle, making this the second gayest film Butler has appeared in, next to Grecian war epic 300 (aka Muscle Beach Massacre).

Perhaps it's his Dickensian bent that makes his films so gruellingly wordy, but Ritchie has never heard the term "show, not tell". He's so clumsy at introducing characters that you feel he couldn't have a fat man walk on screen without a voice-over announcing, "Meet ... the Fat Man."

In all fairness, though, Ritchie has raised his game and learnt to streamline his flurries of action. Notably brisk is a chase with indestructible heavies, and the Jacobean tragedy showdown is taut.

Come the threatened sequel, Ritchie may at last make a film entirely worth watching.

Need to know

Guy Ritchie came out of nowhere (Hatfield, to be precise) with 1998 debut 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels', a fast-paced crime caper that revived the British gangster thriller, spun off into a TV series, and established Ritchie as the most imitated (and derided) Brit director of the age. Success continued with follow-up 'Snatch' (2000), which mixed Brad Pitt in with the usual Brit bruisers, but dried up when Ritchie and wife Madonna indulged themselves in Italian art-film remake 'Swept Away' ("soggy and superfluous": 'The New York Times'). 'Revolver' (2005) was an insane mystical mess. Guy and Madonna hit the headlines this year in a row about beer prices at their London pub, making them the A-list Den and Angie.