Every Guy Ritchie Movie & TV Show, In Order

Ritchie arrived in 1998 with the low-budget gangster comedy-drama Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which featured several of the motifs that would re-occur throughout the director’s career: a performance by Jason Statham, who was then unknown; another by Vinnie Jones, who was previously known only as a footballer; and an interest in the wisecracking but bumbling low-lifes populating the criminal underworld in London.

The film was a huge success and, along with movies like Trainspotting, inspired a whole generation of British and Irish filmmakers. 

Ritchie cannily followed up his cult hit by making basically the same movie again, but with bigger stars: Snatch retained Statham and Jones in its cast, adding Brad Pitt as an indecipherable Irishman and Benicio del Toro as a gambler/thief named Frankie Four-Fingers.

The film, like its predecessor, was a big hit in theatres and quickly became an essential dvd in young, if mostly male, movie-lovers’ collections. If you like that era of Pitt—think Se7en and Fight Club—it’s still a must watch.

By 2002, at the age of 34, Ritchie was already a star director—all the more so for having married Madonna in the year Snatch was released. At this point, however, his golden touch deserted him for the first time.

In 2002, the director received his first critical mauling for Swept Away, an island castaway movie in which Madonna played the lead. The movie was a remake of an Italian comedy from 1974 that explored the class conflict between its isolated characters—similar to recent movies like Triangle of Sadness. Unfortunately for Madonna and Ritchie, much of that satire disappeared in his film and it went on to earn a paltry 6% on Rotten Tomatoes—still the lowest rating of his career. 

Two years later, Ritchie wisely returned to his roots with the crime caper Revolver, starring Jason Statham alongside mob actor royalty of Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) and Vincent Pastore (The Sopranos).

Apparently inspired by a school of thought and mysticism called Kabbalah—and with a plot concerning a con artist who discovers a “formula” to win every game—the movie unfortunately proved too convoluted and left most critics and audiences scratching their heads.

Perhaps a little sore from the reception of his overly ambitious fourth feature, Ritchie returned in 2008 with RocknRolla, a straight-forward crime-comedy caper—about two small-time crooks hoping to make the score of a lifetime—that was much more in his wheelhouse.

Box office-wise, it wasn’t exactly a smash hit but it won the director his best reviews since Snatch. If you’re a fan of Gerard Butler and Tom Hardy and like seeing them in their early roles, you’ll probably get a kick out of it.

While neither Revolver or RocknRolla were as well received as his first two films, they showed that Ritchie was still in the game. Luckily for his fans, his next movie was about to hustle him into a whole new area of mass-market movie-making. 

In 2009, he helmed a steampunk and action-packed adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr in the starring role and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. If you liked RDJ in the first Iron Man, this movie (which was released the following year) taps into the actor’s singular charisma in much the same way. 

The director immediately followed that success with a 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows—which also proved to be a chunky hit at the box office. 

The second instalment in Ritchie's Holmes franchise brings back much of the original cast, with Jared Harris’ evil genius Moriarty (who is teased at the end of the first movie) taking centre stage as the chief antagonist. If you liked the first one, you won’t be disappointed. 

The success of Ritchie’s Holmes movies helped to redefine his career and prove that he had a second string to his bow—namely as a capable overseer of the kind of reboots and reimaginings that Hollywood was singularly focused on putting out at the time.

Ritchie’s next attempt at relaunching an old piece of IP was 2015’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. —a reimagining of the 1964 TV show—which was essentially a James Bond knock off. For the Cold War era tale, Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) and Armie Hammer (The Social Network) play two rival intelligence operatives who have to put aside their differences to fight a common foe. 

Ritchie’s next IP project, Legend of the Sword, was adapted from an even older source material than U.N.C.L.E.—namely, the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. 

This was the first major retelling of the story since John Boorman’s peerless Excalibur and, to be honest, it did little to trouble that film’s legacy. Unlike Boorman’s classic, however, it did feature a cameo from David Beckham—but even the Man United legend couldn’t save it from flagging at the box office. 

Indeed, neither The Man from U.N.C.L.E. nor King Arthur: Legend of the Sword made anywhere near as much money as their studios were hoping. But Ritchie bounced back again when he took charge of the live-action remake of Aladdin—even if it was one of the strangest pairings of director to material you can imagine.

Released in cinemas in 2019 and starring Will Smith as the genie, Aladdin was a billion-dollar smash. If you’ve mostly appreciated the recent live-action Disney remakes, it’s worth checking out.