From the slick testosterone stylings of Guy Ritchie, RockNRolla is pretty much what you'd expect. It's not his best, but neither is it his worst. While many scenes and characters deliver on their trailer teasers, many become a bit less exciting in their full-length format. It's Old School meets New School meets Street School and Prep School smack dab in the middle of the School of Power and Privilege.

With longtime London crime boss Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) working with both Russian billionaire Uri Omovich (Karel Roden) and the small time crooks of The Wild Bunch, a very bored (and very sexy) accountant (Thandie Newton) in the mix, and Lenny's junkie rock star step-son (Toby Kebbell) on the side, you know that their intersecting enterprises and efforts are bound to cause trouble. Really it's just a matter waiting for them all to figure out what's actually going on.

The set-up is this: Lenny is brokering a seven-million-dollar real-estate deal with Uri; One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), the leaders of small time crooks The Wild Bunch, owe Lenny money from a real-estate deal that fell through; and Uri's accountant Stella is bored. Cue the quite amusing theft of the seven million dollars by One Two and Mumbles and the disappearance of Uri's lucky painting from Lenny's safe-keeping. Reveal Lenny's relation to junkie rock star Johnny Quid who has recently disappeared and is presumed dead. And let's just say it all pretty much becomes a race to get the money that's theirs, keep the money they've got, and either stay at the top of their game or prove they are worthy of it.

A movie about power, money, and greed, RockNRolla is very much a portrait of all we will do to get to the top and, in the end, the illusion of what we actually find when we get there. "That's the thing about greed," says Lenny. "It's blind and it doesn't know when to stop." For much of the movie, that is what we see. In Lenny, that blindness is apparent in the power he so eagerly exercises and desperately holds onto. His vision only encircles himself. His only concern is what will benefit him. The tragedy is that in pursuing only his own interests, he will not even stop at destroying the interests of those who are his sons and his brothers.

Then there is Uri and his new order. While Lenny's greedy pursuits of power and control are essentially warped calculations that push him beyond all boundaries of loyalty, brotherhood, and family, Uri and his goons simply do not seem to know how to stop. If Lenny were a race car with no consideration for those in its path, Uri would be the race car who set his course at the beginning and removed both his brakes and his steering wheel before even starting. As we see as Uri's thugs chase down One Two, Mumbles, and Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy) in one of the most amusing scenes in the movie, stopping is just not something they do.

When the buck comes to Stella, it's as if the consequences of the game just slipped her mind. It sounded like fun. It would be a better time than she's having now. Why not? It's not like she has to deal with any of it herself anyway. As One Two asks her after a particularly brutal completion of one of her jobs, "You didn't realize they had machine guns? With war criminals attached to the trigger?" Apparently not.

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