The movie no one understood except Guy Ritchie: “Everyone missed the point”
People are still incredibly nostalgic over Guy Ritchie‘s earlier work, including the gangster flicks like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, as unfortunately, he’s also lent his name to more than a few stinkers, like 2025’s The Fountain of Youth, or if you want to look further afield, then try Swept Away, a poorly conceived ego-trip for his then-wife, Madonna.
Thus, as a result of his spotty record, you can forgive some people for not giving two hoots about Ritchie’s opinions on other people’s work. He’s been very outspoken about The Krays, the gangster biopic starring Martin and Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet fame, and to be honest, he’s probably jealous he never got to make a film about the notorious criminal twins.
However, one movie you might not expect him to be so opinionated on is the 2007 fantasy flick Beowulf, based on the famous Old English epic poem, but it really set something alight in his imagination.
“That’s the film I’ve enjoyed most in the last couple of years,” he told First Showing back in 2008, “It is fucking deep, and everyone missed the point. Now I remember why I’ve seen it twice in IMAX 3D. That was the whole point.”
Directed by the great Robert Zemeckis, Beowulf stars Ritchie’s old rival, Ray Winstone, in the title role, not that you’d be able to tell it was him from looks alone. This is one of Zemeckis’ many, many experiments with CGI, and Winstone was turned into a slightly haunting ‘uncanny valley’ version of himself to play the role (think a weird mixture of Tom Hanks in The Polar Express and Robert De Niro in The Irishman). The movie’s, shall we say, ‘unique’ visual style put a lot of people off, but Ritchie couldn’t have cared less.
In his eyes, Beowulf isn’t the story of a heroic warrior doing battle with a series of supernatural villains but about mankind and its struggle with various vices. “The dragon represents his pride,” he explained, “[He] also has temptation come to him in the shape of what’s her name with the big tits and the nails: Angelina Jolie. She is the temptation of pride.” A classy and respectful thesis there from the esteemed Prof Ritchie.
The funniest thing about this entire ramble, which goes on for several paragraphs during the original interview, is that Ritchie is very late to the party, about an entire millennium late. Scholars estimate that Beowulf (the poem, not the film) was first written anywhere between 700 and 1000 AD, and as one of the oldest and most famous texts in the English language, it has been the subject of debate and reevaluation for centuries.
The fact that Ritchie described one of the most scrutinised and interpreted stories of all time as completely uninteresting until you understand it that way, as in ‘his way’, is equal parts pathetic and hilarious.
Of course, there’s every chance Ritchie could be talking uniquely about Zemeckis’ adaptation; however, given that he referred to Angelina Jolie as “what’s her name with the big tits” in the same interview, forgive me for not giving him the benefit of the doubt.
