Revolver (15)<br></br> Howl's Moving Castle (U)

Admire his chutzpah, at least, in managing to persuade a single executive to back his impenetrable script. Actually, "impenetrable" makes it sound interestingly enigmatic, whereas it's just smug, lumpen and meaningless. Say what you like about Ritchie's debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but its quick-fire, ad-soaked storytelling had a choppy sort of energy. How keenly he needs some of that here.

Jason Statham plays a con man, Jake Green, who's just done a seven-year stretch in prison for someone else's crime. While in solitary, it seems he's perfected an unfathomable system of winning at the blackjack table, and now has the means to take on his arch-enemy, a casino boss named Macha (Ray Liotta).

So it's your traditional geezer revenge plot, only it's been gussied up as a metaphysical journey of the soul involving chess, mathematics and a shadowy crime lord named "Sam Gold", also known as "Mr Clandestine" and even "Mr Ambiguity".

I think we're meant to be impressed by this darkly mysterious personage, though all it suggested to me was an abiding envy of Keyser Soze's elusive presence in The Usual Suspects.

The frequent imitations of keynote directors make Ritchie look like the Mike Yarwood of crime movies: among others, he does the slo-mo tumbling-man sequence from Casino, the manga rip-off of Tarantino's Kill Bill, the operatic slaughter of The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America. It's not the pilfering you mind, it's the abject paucity of excitement or wit that accompanies it.

When Macha tries to have Jake bumped off, only the timely intervention of Zach (Vincent Pastore) and Avi (André Benjamin) save his neck. These two call themselves "loan sharks", though once they co-opt Jake as their driver they turn out to be more like personal counsellors, with a shared fondness for the philosophical soundbite - for instance: "The only way to get smarter at chess is by playing a smarter opponent."

There's a fair bit more of this, flashed up on intertitles in a rather proud way, as if Ritchie has been riffling through a compendium of quotations and picked out the least resonant ones of all.

Statham alternates between staring hard into the camera and an interior monologue that becomes as irritating as a stone in your shoe. His big scene happens in a lift, where he soliloquises a kind of fugue-cum-mental breakdown after failing to murder Macha, defenceless in his bed. It seems to last for ever, and is topped for absurdity by Liotta's confronting him as the lift doors slide open. "Fear me!" he snarls at Jake, but given that we've just seen him asleep in a hairnet, this is a tough-guy act that won't wash.

There's not even a clue as to what city we're in, the Anglo-American cast suggesting some halfway (halfwit) house between London and New York. That vagueness hasn't stopped Ritchie going to town on the noirish opulence of his notional underworld - the black limos, the baronial interiors, the immaculately tailored suits and crisp white shirts. Well, there goes the budget.

It's all very spiffy, and very empty. Poor Liotta has to bear the brunt of the mobster vulgarity, his teeth spookily whitened inside a tanning room, his torso clad in skimpy briefs and silk dressing-gown (another stolen look, this time from Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights). I trust the fee was worth the abandonment of his dignity. For now, consider Guy Ritchie, the man who survived the wreck of Swept Away. Should he also escape the fallout from this meretricious and militantly boring movie, he will be the luckiest man alive.

Barely more intelligible, though infinitely more likeable, is Howl's Moving Castle by the cult Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. This is as bizarre, if not quite as bewitching, as the director's previous Oscar-winning yarn Spirited Away, and tips its hat at many of the same influences: The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Kafka and Ovid, with a belated nod to Beauty and The Beast. The movie is actually based on a children's book by the English writer Diana Wynne Jones about a shy milliner, Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer) who no sooner falls for the handsome wizard Howl (Christian Bale) than she's transformed into a 90-year-old crone by the Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall). The real star of the show, however, is the titular castle, which clanks across the landscape on spindly legs, like some fever-dream collaboration between Terry Gilliam and Heath Robinson.

What follows would be impossible to summarise, let alone understand, even within the elastic limits of fairy tale. While there's no denying Miyazaki's visual flair and tip-top draughtsmanship, I found myself less than enchanted by the mile-high convolutions of the plot, and frankly bored by the final half-hour in which the movie more or less disappears in a vapour trail of surreal twists and transformations. Time travel, airborne battleships, a mysterious war, a hopalong scarecrow with a heart of gold - are we meant to piece it all together, or simply tune out and enjoy the trip? Kids raised on Harry Potter will probably manage to do both, but for those who've mislaid their inner child, this might drag.