The movie Guy Ritchie called “shit”
Having set out his stall as the purveyor of wisecracking, fast-faced crime capers with a rich vein of jet-black humour, the first film Guy Ritchie made that saw him deviating from that template proved to be such a disaster it could have torpedoed his career entirely.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch were hugely influential on British cinema at the turn of the millennium. Ritchie gained plenty of notice as one of the country’s fastest-rising and stylish filmmakers, which inevitably led to a slew of thinly-veiled imitators seeking to recapture that success.
Every director needs to broaden their horizons eventually, but for Ritchie, deciding that a vanity project was the best way to do it turned out to be a colossal misstep. Opting to cast then-wife Madonna in the lead role of Swept Away as his first port of call away from the criminal underworld, the horrendous romantic drama was savaged by anyone unfortunate enough to see it.
A remake of the 1974 Italian film of the same name, the ‘Queen of Pop’ co-starred with Adriano Giannini, the son of the original’s leading man Giancarlo. Amber Leighton and Giuseppe Esposito can’t stand each other but are forced to put their differences aside when the self-absorbed socialite deckhand ends up trapped on a deserted island with only each other for company.
Thoroughly atrocious in every sense of the word, Swept Away was deservedly honoured with Golden Raspberry Awards for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Actress’, ‘Worst Screen Couple’, and ‘Worst Remake or Sequel’. The response proved so harsh that it wasn’t even released in Ritchie’s native United Kingdom.
As for why, he offered a bullish response that hit the nail squarely on the head. “It won’t be released here because it’s shit,” he said at the time to The Guardian. “The idea was that the wife and I would make some sassy little art movie, but we got the shit kicked out of us.” That being said, he still defended it, maintaining that “it’s a good film” despite the response leaving him “shaking my head”.
Madonna decided to place the blame squarely on critics and Ritchie’s own success and not the fact she and her spouse had made an awful, awful movie together. “The way critics take it out on me now is to have a go at anything me and Guy do together,” she claimed. “I think the knives were going to come out for Guy anyway, even if he hadn’t ended up with me. He had too much success with his first two films. That’s how the media is: eventually, they have to pull you down.”
Although there was an element of truth in Madonna’s words, the fact Swept Away was a steaming turd of cinema definitely played a significant part in its evisceration.
