Guy Ritchie is a once-hot director (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) who baked his career and turned himself into an international joke when his remake of Wertmuller’s Swept Away tanked, in large part because he made it with Madonna, his wife. And then he made things worse with a film called Revolver which nobody liked when it showed at Sundance last January. Now he’s having another go, although he’s occupying a lower postiion on the totem pole.
According to the Guardian, Richie is the third helmer to try and get a crime flick rolling called Static. It’s about a wrongly-convicted mob guy being forced to testifying against some dirty cops. Ritchie will reportedly rewrite and direct the script, which was first written by New Zealand director Brad McGann five years ago.
The point is that back in the late ’90s Ritchie would have been the guy to make this film, but the Static producers came to him only after first trying to make it work with Stephen Kay and then music-video maestro Chris Robinson. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw reportedly wrote earlier this year that “after Revolver, Swept Away now looks like Citizen Kane“.