What happened to Revolver? And I'm not just talking about the fact that the screenplay has been floating around for years and the final product was released in the UK over two years ago. I mean what happened to a project that should have been one of the most anticipated of the season after Guy Ritchie made Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch but evolved into something far more disappointing. Was it chopped up in post-production? Was it rewritten to death? Or was Revolver always the mess that's being quietly released in theaters this weekend? The mystery surrounding the production and how someone as talented as Ritchie could produce a film this ineptly made are the most interesting elements of Revolver. It's certainly not the film itself.

Jake Green (Jason Statham) is a con man who has done time in solitary confinement for the last few years. On one side of his cell was a master chess player and on the other was a master con man. Using notes scribbled in books passed between the cells and never actually seeing his neighbors, Mr. Green learned the tricks of the trade. He gets released with a plan to take down his enemy, Macha (Ray Liotta), using the tools of chess and the art of the con. Shortly after he's released, Jake gets approached by two men named Avi and Zach (Andre Benjamin, Vincent Pastore) who seem to know what's going to happen before he does and they tell him that he has three days to live. The two men will help guide Jake through his revenge plot on Macha but Jake has to turn over all of his money and free will to them. Before you start to think that it's not an accident that the two men have names that start with A to Z, it's around here that you can tell that Revolver is going to try to go places that Snatch and Lock, Stock never did. Do the two men even exist? Does Jake? Is Macha pure evil? Is Jake the ego or the id? Why can't anyone just make a good 'shoot 'em up' any more?

By the time that Revolver gets to its ridiculous final act and Ritchie has tried to throw in everything from animation to actual documentary footage discussing the role of the ego in the human mind, the audience is likely to have thrown something at the screen in frustration. Revolver starts promising and then becomes one of the most incoherent major releases that I've ever seen. Was it that way on paper? While it's clear that poor post-production led to some of the problems with Revolver, it seems like a misguided project from the beginning. Ritchie has written a script, partially inspired by his wife's adoration of Kabbalah, that mistakes being confusing with being deep and it seems that no post-production work could have saved it.

Let me offer just one example of the dozen or so mistakes made during some stage of production on Revolver. There are plenty of jaw-dropping decisions, but this one is the icing on the cake. In the final act, Ritchie starts a habit of allowing his major characters, including Green and Macha, to argue with their own inner monologues. For an unbelievable amount of time near the climax, we watch Jason Statham fight with the voice inside his head while trapped in an elevator. It's mystifyingly awful in its execution and one of the worst scenes of the year. It's a climax that will be satisfying to no one.

Looking at plot descriptions of the version of Revolver released in other markets makes it clear that the one hitting US theaters this weekend was basically put in an editorial blender before release. Why does this happen? If a movie doesn't work, what possibly makes a studio head think that taking crucial plot elements out of the film will turn it into a better final product? Revolver may never have been a hit like Lock, Stock or Snatch but it could have at least been semi-coherent at one point and developed into a cult hit. Not any more. The talented people involved, which despite the failure of both Swept Away and this film still includes Guy Ritchie, deserved better. So did their fans.