‘Snatch’: Rupert Grint Goes Gangster

For the length of its first episode, Snatch — a TV adaptation of the 2000 Guy Ritchie film now streaming on Crackle — is pretty entertaining. It’s fun, for a while, to see Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint playing a grubby little would-be master criminal named Charlie. He and his overreaching crew, which includes a boxer, Billy (Lucien Laviscount), and a callow hustler, Albie (Luke Pasqualino), strut through damp city streets in England, pulling minor heists that accidentally turn into one major one, involving bars of pure gold.

The characters are presented in the frenetic style that typified Ritchie’s film — lots of rapid-fire editing suddenly yanked into slo-mo; whooshing camera pans and split-screens. But as reconceived for television by writer-producer Alex De Rakoff, Snatch becomes tiresome in its constant attempts to dazzle the viewer. The new series doesn’t use the characters from the film, and the ones De Rakoff has invented are sometimes charming, and sometimes irritating. Most charming is Dougray Scott as Albie’s criminal dad, trapped in jail but in frequent contact with his family via Skype. Most irritating is Ed Westwick as Sonny, a Cuban gangster. In a failed attempt to forestall invidious comparisons to the Al Pacino Scarface, another character quotes a line from that film in the second episode, to suggest that Snatch is knowing about its influences. Alas, that doesn’t make Westwick’s character any less cocaine-coated trite.

By the second episode, which includes a subplot with a trio of criminal Orthodox Jews who take drugs and rap frenetically, Snatch starts to seem a little desperate for both thrills and laughs. The show also becomes awfully literal-minded. One thugs snarls a threat: “I’ll cut off your c*** and put it in a pickle jar” — and the camera cuts to a pickle jar filled with large green gherkins. Ouch and ick.

‘Snatch’ is streaming its 10-episode first season now on Crackle.

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