IT'S been hard to ignore the extreme critical response to Guy Ritchie's latest tale of hoodlums and con men.

In fact, it's been like a pack of ravenous wolves tearing a carcass to shreds. So is it really all that bad?

The film opens as small-time crook Jake Green finishes a seven-year prison term. Flash forward two years, and Green is re-established, ready to exact revenge upon Dorothy Macha, the man who stitched him up.

But a simple scam to fleece the corrupt casino boss quickly becomes far more complicated. Jake finds himself at the centre of an ever-changing game, unsure who the players are, who is conning who, and even, perhaps, who Jake himself truly is.

So, despite a colourful cast of gun-toting gangsters, this is obviously no rehash of the cheeky antics of Lock, Stock or Snatch. Instead, Revolver has far grander ambitions, using its plot to explore all sorts of complex concepts and ideas. And that's fine; the ideas that we are our own most formidable opponents, that we can only improve our game by playing someone better are interesting enough to be the basis for a film. Revolver fails drastically in coherently presenting them to the audience, despite hammering us over the head with quote after quote to help explain.

And the story that frames these ideas just isn't compelling. It feels like two hours of pseudo-philosophical gobbledegook, and irritates when it should intrigue.

The film tries to send the audience away thinking, which is great; not nearly enough movies try to involve their viewers so strongly.

But, unlike, say, Donnie Darko or David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, which are similarly head scratchy affairs, Revolver just isn't engaging.

The characters are dull, spouting half-baked philosophical clichs instead of displaying real personalities, and there's little in the way of gripping mood or atmosphere.

The question that looms largest by the end, is "so what?" There's just no incentive to care about what is essentially a cold, empty, wannabe-intellectual exercise. Even more frustrating is that some of the individual scenes are excellent. Whenever anxious hitman Sorter (Mark Strong) pops up, things improve dramatically.

There's a nerve frazzling ambush on Jake, a superbly realized assassination attempt on Macha, and a late sequence of gunplay that's as slick as anything Ritchie has ever filmed. Meanwhile the set design is striking, and the performances solid.

Ray Liotta is great fun as the unhinged Macha, barking orders while wearing the silliest pair of Speedos in cinema history. Jason Statham, meanwhile, does what he can as Jake, even if the role only demands he look tetchy and menacing.

Even if you respect the level of ambition, that's no consolation when the hammer finally falls on a disappointingly empty chamber.

Neil Phillips