Cast: Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Andre Benjamin, Vincent Pastore, Terence Maynard, Mark Strong.

IT'S taken four years for this film to come out on DVD in Australia. Why? Because it sucks.

Guy Ritchie, once the golden boy of the critics, made this in The Madonna Years. Having scaled the heights with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch - breathing life into the British gangster film in the process - Ritchie crashed to Earth with a resounding thud thanks to Swept Away, which starred his then-wife, and this Kabbalah-infused turkey.

Revolver is an attempt to return to his guns-and-cons glory days, but with an added cerebral and psychological twist a la Fight Club or The Game.

However Ritchie's desire to reclaim his crown as the English Tarantino after the critical pounding he received for Swept Away leads him to attempt an arty re-invention of his earlier genre of choice that fails in every way possible as he makes his characters representative of elements of the psyche. Overthinking it a bit much, Guy?

Statham plays Jake Green, a tough guy who learnt the secret to the ultimate con while in prison. But once out of the clink, a pair of loan sharks - Avi (Benjamin) and Jake (Pastore) - manage to rope Green into being their lap dog.

Beyond that little synopsis, the plot makes no sense. In fact, how they get Green to do their bidding makes no sense and neither does the secret to the ultimate con.

Ritchie's elusive plot is filled with pointless dead ends and every time you feel like some light is about to be shone on the situation, the movie frustratingly shoves you down another dark corridor.

This would be okay if there was a pay-off at the end, but there isn't. Instead the end credits are accompanied by footage of psychologists discussing the ego, following on from the cast lumbering over psycho-babble about how chess is like life, life is a con, our biggest enemy is ourselves, we need to cause ourselves pain to free ourselves, etc, etc.

The only upsides are some of the performances, particularly Strong as a hitman who never misses, but Ritchie has missed his own mark here by a long shot. Stylistically it's all over the shop - there's even an animated section for no apparent reason - and apparently the film is stuffed with Kaballah references, but since when should we have to read up on a religious fad and the significance of certain numbers and colours to understand a Jason Statham movie?

You wanna see Ritchie return to his gangster best? Hire his subsequent film Rock 'N' Rolla instead.