A gay Guy Ritchie movie? My dear boy, he’s a married man. But I’ve never seen a gangster thriller punctuated by quite so much homoeroticism. Gerard Butler plays One Two, a rugged beefcake who steals millions of euros from a Russian oligarch and football club owner, Uri Obromavich (Karel Roden). When One Two is not tied to the bed and tortured by Uri’s humourless Soviet henchmen – stripped down to their leather pouches - he is being hit on by his best friend and fellow gang member, Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy). This particular shock revelation prompts a horrified Butler to slam on the brakes nearly catapulting his ex-best friend through the front windshield of their 4x4. “You’re the only one who didn’t notice” explains his new best friend, Mumbles. “So tell me, what did you do with Bob last night…” Well, can you guess? And so it goes, a mesmerising swirl of gay insults and imagery - there's even some man-on-man ballroom dancing.

This piquant and bemusing twist apart, RocknRolla is a standard issue Ritchie thug movie complete with captions, slow motion shots of Thandie Newton in high heels, and bags of raucous rock music. Our droll narrator is Mark Strong, the chief enforcer for a corrupt London property tycoon, played with comic venom by Tom Wilkinson. Wilkinson quite literally squeezes the testicles of a corrupt councillor (Jimi Mistry) to swing huge illegal deals with unscrupulous billionaires like Obromavich. Unfortunately, Obromavich keeps getting mugged every time he goes to the bank.

The film is basically another mad trawl through London’s seedy underworld with mavericks and crack addicts around every corner. The film hurtles propulsively on and if there is any vicarious pleasure to be had it's in the high-octane battery of car charses, punch-ups and bungled heists. There are Maguffins galore: a “lucky” stolen painting which you never actually see; a dead punk rock star who is very much alive (and constantly filmed topless, with rippling six pack); and of course the seemingly unkillable, pouch-wearing Russian mafiosa.

The parable is as hokey as one could wish. Old school crime lords like Wilkinson’s greedy Kray, Lenny Cole, are being shunted out of London by high-rolling immigrants. The old-fashioned tools of the trade – such as Lenny’s tank full of carnivorous giant crayfish – are beginning to look ridiculous and out-of-date. But the new premiere league criminals seem spookily familiar. For all the hot talk about London’s rapidly changing skyline, there is scant visual evidence presented on screen.

As ever with Ritchie films, the entire point is how neatly the pieces of his melodrama stack up, except here there are an uncharacteristic number of loose ends. Entire storylines and characters are brushed under the carpet in the desperate rush to find a suitably bloody ending to this weary ronde. The Lock, Stock... and Snatch director is still taking his cues from his American idol, Quentin Tarantino. But he has clearly run out of invention, if not sheer nerve.

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