There are two Guy Ritchies. One makes films about London criminals with names like Bacon and Turkish, cut like a card trick, scored to Britpop and reggae, in which everyone talks like they are trying to win a bet. The other makes big studio adventures with a slightly more sober edit and a great deal more money. Both of them have made films we love and films we would rather not discuss.
This is all sixteen theatrical features, worst to best. We have left out In the Grey because at the time of writing it still has not had a proper release, which for a Ritchie film is a story in itself.
16. Swept Away (2002)
A remake of a Lina Wertmuller film with Madonna as a rich woman stranded on an island with a deckhand. It is the only Ritchie film with no interest in being a Ritchie film, and it shows. The one everyone skips, and they are right to.
15. Revolver (2005)
Jason Statham with hair, a chess metaphor that never resolves, and a voiceover explaining a con that the film itself does not seem to understand. There is a good Ray Liotta performance buried in here somewhere. Ritchie has called it his most personal film. It is certainly his most confusing.
14. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
The one that was supposed to launch six films and instead lost a reported hundred million dollars. The strange thing is the first twenty minutes are properly good, with Charlie Hunnam growing up in a brothel and learning to fight in a montage that is pure Ritchie. Then the giant elephants arrive.
13. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023)
A spy caper with Statham, Aubrey Plaza and Hugh Grant doing a Hugh Grant. Perfectly watchable, instantly forgettable, delayed a year by the pandemic and then released like a secret. Grant is the reason to see it.
12. Aladdin (2019)
A billion dollars at the box office and not a single frame you would recognise as belonging to the man who made Snatch. Will Smith works harder than anyone should have to. It is fine. It is a Disney remake. Ritchie treated it as a job and did the job.
11. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
Bigger, louder and less charming than the first one, but Jared Harris is a genuinely unsettling Moriarty and the forest ambush, shot in extreme slow motion, is the kind of set piece that makes you forgive a baggy middle hour.
10. Fountain of Youth (2025)
A streaming treasure hunt with John Krasinski and Natalie Portman that plays like a Ritchie film made by someone doing a very good impression of Ritchie. Handsome, brisk, and gone from your head by the time the credits roll.
9. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
The film that should have been a hit. Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer as rival spies in 1963, a split-screen sequence that is genuinely funny, and the best costumes in his filmography. Nobody went. It has been quietly finding its audience ever since.
8. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
A true story about the birth of the special forces turned into a lads-on-tour war comedy. Henry Cavill with a beard and a bow, Alan Ritchson as a man who seems to enjoy stabbing, and Eiza Gonzalez running rings around all of them. Not deep. Very entertaining.
7. Sherlock Holmes (2009)
The film that reinvented Ritchie as a studio director. Robert Downey Jr plays Holmes as a bare-knuckle boxer with a deduction problem, Jude Law is the best screen Watson, and the fight-planning device, where Holmes narrates the beating before he delivers it, is the Ritchie edit finally finding a home in a period piece.
6. Wrath of Man (2021)
The cold one. A remake of a French thriller with Statham as a man who joins an armoured truck company for reasons that take an hour to explain. No jokes, no geezers, a Christopher Benstead score that sounds like a threat. It is the closest Ritchie has come to Michael Mann and it is much better than its release suggested.
5. The Covenant (2023)
Jake Gyllenhaal as a US sergeant in Afghanistan and Dar Salim as the interpreter who carries him across the mountains, then the film flips and the sergeant goes back for him. No dialogue tricks, no title cards, and Ritchie's best directed action in years. His most serious film and, by some distance, his most moving.
4. RocknRolla (2008)
The comeback after Revolver and Swept Away. Tom Wilkinson as an old-school London boss, Mark Strong narrating, Gerard Butler dancing with Thandiwe Newton, and Toby Kebbell as the junkie rock star everyone thinks is dead. It promised a sequel called The Real RocknRolla in its final title card. We are still waiting.
3. The Gentlemen (2019)
Ritchie's return to the London crime film after a decade away, and he came back with the cast of his life. Matthew McConaughey selling a weed empire, Hugh Grant as a sleazy private investigator pitching the plot as a screenplay, and Colin Farrell as Coach, a boxing trainer in a tartan tracksuit who steals every scene he is in and got his own series for it. It is the most fun he has had since Snatch.
2. Snatch (2000)
Bigger, faster and more American than Lock, Stock, with Brad Pitt as an unintelligible bare-knuckle boxer, Benicio del Toro as a man with an eighty-four carat diamond, and Alan Ford's Brick Top explaining what to feed pigs. It is the film most people mean when they say "a Guy Ritchie film". Every line is quotable. Every character has a name that sounds like a pub.
1. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Made for under a million pounds, with a cast of unknowns, a footballer and Sting, and it changed British film for a decade. Four mates lose half a million at cards to Hatchet Harry and try to rob their neighbours to pay it back. The freeze frames, the slang, the narration, the three-card brag scene shot like a horror film: none of it had been done like this before, and everything after it was chasing it. We could have listed it first out of sentiment. We listed it first because it is still the best. Play it against Snatch on This or That and see how the room votes.
The pattern
Ritchie is best when he is close to home and worst when he is furthest from it. The two London films and RocknRolla sit at the top, the island and the myth sit at the bottom, and the interesting cases are the ones in the middle where he finds a way to be himself inside someone else's genre. He makes a film a year now. On this evidence the next great one will be set within twenty miles of Bethnal Green.