Revolver is a 2005 action thriller film[6] co-written and directed by Guy Ritchie, and starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, and André Benjamin.
This is the fourth feature film by Ritchie and his third to centre on crime and professional criminals, but also has a strong philosophy and Buddhist moral content.
In an unidentified city, cockney gangster and gambler Jake Green is released from prison after a seven-year stretch in solitary confinement for an unspecified crime.
Two years later, Jake and his brother Billy travel to a casino owned by Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta), a gang boss involved in illegal gambling all over the city.
Though Billy is reluctant, the brothers have arrived to collect the debt that Green believes the gangster owes them.
As the shooting continues, the same mysterious individual, a loan shark named Zach, arrives and rescues Jake, who is the only person to survive the hit.
The mysterious men reveal that his money will be used to fund their money-lending enterprise, then question Jake about his time in prison.
During his stint in solitary confinement, Jake learns of a specific strategy (referred to as "the Formula") that is supposed to let its user win every game.
During the first five years of his seven-year sentence, the three men communicate their thoughts on confidence tricks and chess moves via messages hidden inside library books, such as The Mathematics of Quantum Mechanics.
Jake garnered a reputation that led many gambling houses to fear his freakishly good "luck", and is blacklisted by many casinos.
Meanwhile, Macha brokers a cocaine deal with Lily Walker, the advisor of unseen crime kingpin Sam Gold, who is supposedly the "ultimate figure" that all other underworld members aspire to be.
Jake accompanies Avi and Zach as they perform a heist of a vault full of the cocaine from Macha's casino.
Desperate that he is now indebted to Gold, Macha sends Paul to appeal to his rival, Triad kingpin Lord John, to sell him replacement cocaine at a heavily inflated price.
Furious, Lord John sends a hitwoman dressed as a waitress to kill Macha at his restaurant.
He is later visited by Walker, though, who claims that Gold is furious at Macha's newfound publicity and his constant delaying of the deal.
Three days after Jake found out about his terminal diagnoses, he awakes to a call from Avi, who tells him he is "free" of his disease.
The men explain to Jake that by stripping him of the physical embodiment of ego (his money) they have freed him from Gold's "game".
By doing this, Jake steps off the proverbial chess board by making a conscious effort to reverse everything his ego tells him to do.
In the theatrical release of the film, Jake finds out about the niece's kidnapping and decides to return the crime boss's money to save her.
However, during the production process, Ritchie changed his mind and decided to score a majority of the film with original music, leaving only some small sections to nonoriginal music tracks (such as the restaurant shoot-out during Lord John's attempted assassination of Dorothy Macha).
The consensus reads, "In attempting to meld his successful previous formulas with philosophical musings, Guy Ritchie has produced an incoherent misfire.
"[16] Reviews were so poor in the UK that a positive quote placed prominently on the film's poster, saying that the director was "back to his best" and attributed to the newspaper The Sun, in fact came from a promotional section of the Sun's website created and paid for by a public-relations agency on behalf of the film's distributors.
[18] According to Brian Orndorf, Revolver "is the perfect movie for those who like to crack things open and dig around the innards", saying that it "reminded [him] quite a bit of Richard Kelly's film, Donnie Darko".
He goes on to explain that "both films have a taste for the deliberately confusing, sharing scripts that take the viewer on a ride that requires much more than one simple viewing.