Revolver marks director Guy Ritchie's return to the gangster movie. It's a genre he helped reinvigorate with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch before taking a breather to direct wife Madonna in the notorious bomb Swept Away. However, Revolver isn't a cause for celebration quite yet. Ritchie may be returning to familiar ground, but this time around, he's brought a philosophical edge to the table that, quite simply, gums up the whole works. Although I enjoy seeing some brains go along with an action movie's bloodshed, the ramblings Revolver serves up had me pleading for the characters to just shoot someone already.

After serving a seven-year prison sentence in solitary confinement, Jake (Jason Statham) is now a free man with one goal in mind: getting revenge on Macha (Ray Liotta), the casino impresario responsible for sending him up the river. Jake promptly proceeds to embarass Macha to the point of being marked for death when two incidents happen and change his life forever. First, a pair of loan sharks (Vincent Pastore and Andre Benjamin) rescue Jake and offer him total protection -- in exchange for every penny he has. Their entrance into Jake's world also comes with the news that our hero has been stricken with an incurable blood disease set to claim his life in a matter of days. Seeing no other choice, Jake joins up with the mysterious duo, unaware that he has just become part of a game more complicated than he could have ever imagined.

To describe Revolver as complex is like saying water is a tad moist. The film achieves a level of intricacy and ambiguity usually reserved for David Lynch. But the difference involves Lynch's tales being meant to come across with a dreamlike aura, while Revolver's story requires a massive amount of explanation that Ritchie apparently refuses to part with. In fact, with the tagline "Your mind will not accept a game this big," the flick seems ready and willing to brand those who can't penetrate its labyrinthine thematics as idiots. By no means am I opposed to a crime picture trying to rise above the shoot-'em-up theatrics which all too often bog down the genre. But it hurts when the same man whose previous two gangster flicks came packed with rapid-fire humor and quirky characters allows his story to become buried underneath mountains of increasingly confounding philosophies.

Starting out with a few nice mental nuggets to chew on, Revolver quickly turns into a veritable monster that goes just about off its rails. The plot becomes almost impossible to follow, as questions are posed but never answered and motivations are never fully explained. Don't expect to see a delightfully convoluted con game unfold before your eyes. Instead, be prepared to witness an arcane mess piling on the secrets as it goes along. Still, despite so much thematic pressure bearing down on it, Revolver retains the Guy Ritchie style at least on a visual scale, and the performances don't suffer too much. Liotta doesn't get much to do aside from throwing an occasional temper tantrum, but Statham fares decently as a hero going through a personal transformation, and Pastore and Benjamin offer up intriguing turns as a pair of crooks who may or may not be Jake's saving graces.

While I'm not recommending Revolver, it works brilliantly as an endurance test, measuring how much of the weary plot you can take before wanting to use the DVD for discus practice.

MY RATING: * 1/2 (out of ****)

(Released by Sony Pictures and rated "R" for profanity, violence and nudity.)