Pitt and the other American actors (Benicio del Toro and Dennis Farina) are not the distractions they might have been. Pitt is submerged in his character as a Gypsy boxer with a mumbly (and utterly convincing) brogue. Del Toro sports some kind of odd, generically "European" accent, but his slouching, heavy-lidded air of veiled menace seems right at home here. Two of the holdovers from Lock, Stock, Jason Statham as Turkish ("named after an airline"), the narrator and the closest thing to a lead character in the movie, and Vinnie Jones as Bullet Tooth Tony are particularly charismatic.
Most of the violence takes place out of our sight. When you review the body count, it's a little chilling to realize how funny it all is. There's really only one death in the film that you don't laugh at, and it felt like a miscalculation to include it because it so abruptly broke the light-hearted mood. Still, the movie has plenty of jokes that don't involve someone being killed or maimed. Hmmm, maybe "plenty" is an exaggeration. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
I hope this isn't the beginning of a disturbing trend, but this is the first of two movies being released in the next few months to feature man-eating pigs (Hannibal being the other). I am keeping a list of things that make any movie better (so far I have "pirates" and "decapitations"), and man-eating pigs is not one of them.
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