This is a nervous week for gangland nostalgia. Guy Ritchie is trying to shoot his way back into fashion ten years after his sensational debut, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. And the Pang brothers – identical twins Danny and Oxide – have given their 1999 art-house hit Bangkok Dangerous a multimillion dollar makeover starring Nicolas Cage.

The problem with Guy Ritchie’s entertaining caper RocknRolla is that it brings back too many jaundiced memories and fails to lay any fresh tracks. We are back in the only milieu in which he ever excelled as a writer, namely the cod-Hogarthian underbelly of London’s modern crime world. Unfortunately, his topical twist is as novel as a Paisley sermon. London’s Mr Big, a property tycoon called Lenny Cole, is the last of the Old School sharks. He believes in torture, the BNP, sharp gardening implements and dunking victims in a tank full of carnivorous crayfish. He also believes he’s invincible.

Tom Wilkinson plays Lenny with wonderful comic venom. But there is no disguising that he is a standard-issue villain in an absurd Guy Ritchie thriller. Dressed, Tarantino-style, in sunglasses and a charcoal suit, Lenny is as up to date with the happening times as Ronnie Kray.

He squeezes the testicles of London’s top councillor (the mayor?) to swing a fishy deal with an unscrupulous Russian billionaire called Uri Obromavich, proud owner of a West London football club and the sophisticated new face of crime. This is as sharp as the satire gets. Lenny and Uri, the old and the new, whisky and Perrier, fume and bluff. When that fails it’s out with the golf clubs and the tasty kitchen knives.

There are Macguffins galore: notably a “lucky” stolen painting and a dead punk rock star who turns out to be very much alive.

Mark Strong is the droll, saving grace in this macho jigsaw. He triples up as Lenny’s loyal enforcer and the film’s sardonic narrator. He translates the lingo, and tees up each chapter of this murky ronde. But even he fails to illuminate the most bemusing mystery of all. Ritchie has crammed RocknRolla with innumerable homoerotic lads’-mag jokes. He has probably calculated that if the film fails on the high street, he could feasibly relaunch it as late-night gay cabaret.

The chief tease is Gerard Butler’s rugged beefcake and crooked heart-throb. When he is not tied to his bed by Uri’s humour-lous Russian henchmen – stripped down to their leather pouches – he is being hit on by his best friend, and fellow gang member, Handsome Bob. This shock revelation nearly sends him through a windscreen. “You’re the only one who didn’t notice,” someone says. “So tell me what did you do with Bob last night . . ?”

15, 114 minutes

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