From left, Mumbles (Idris Elba), One Two (Gerard Butler) and Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy) tangle with the Russian mob in Guy Ritchie's British crime comedy RocknRolla. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Unlike his wife, Madonna, who has spent her career reinventing herself, filmmaker Guy Ritchie is stuck in a rut. His new crime comedy, RocknRolla, is pretty much like his first one, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), or the one that came after it, Snatch (2000). Once again, we have slapstick violence, thick-as-a-brick thugs and a serpentine plot that turns out to be a snake biting its own tail. Ritchie replicates the formula of those previous films as slavishly as if he were following step-by-step instructions. Mind you, maybe the writer-director feels burned from the few times he’s tried something different – people are still gnashing their teeth over his wretched remake of Swept Away.

RocknRolla strives to be hip and current. Ritchie’s criminals are dealing in high-price London real estate now, instead of drugs (Lock, Stock…) or diamonds (Snatch), and there’s a subplot in the new film that riffs on the Amy Winehouse-Pete Doherty vogue for junkie pop stars. But underneath all that, RocknRolla is wearily familiar and not half as entertaining as its predecessors. A comic style that once felt fresh and cocky has hardened into shtick.

As before, Ritchie’s terrain is the various strata of the criminal world, from the sleek top dog — Lenny (Tom Wilkinson), an aging mob boss with a paw in every pie — to the scruffy, street-level curs, namely a gang of petty thieves dubbed “The Wild Bunch,” who are led by One Two (Gerard Butler). Then there’s the foreign outsider, in this case a super-rich Russian named Uri (Karel Roden), who is brokering a land deal with the help of Lenny’s connections.

In Lock, Stock… an antique shotgun served as the plot’s MacGuffin. This time, it’s a painting, owned by Uri but lent to Lenny for good luck, only to be nicked by Lenny’s estranged stepson, a rock star named Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell). Johnny is a philosophizing crack addict who regularly fakes his own death to boost his record sales. When the film opens, Johnny is in a posthumous mode, having supposedly tumbled off a yacht, and Lenny has to flush him out of hiding to get the painting back for Uri.

Except Uri isn’t keeping up his end of their deal. His promised payments to Lenny are repeatedly robbed by One Two and his partner, Mumbles (Idris Elba), who are working for Uri’s double-crossing accountant, Stella (Thandie Newton). It wouldn’t be a Ritchie film without a ridiculously convoluted plot, but by now that comic conceit — like the one in which his low-life characters speak in literary metaphors — is wearing thin.

More bothersome, though, is the way the picture mostly squanders a great cast. Ritchie has assembled an impressive lineup, but only Wilkinson and Kebbell get a chance to sink their teeth into their roles. Wilkinson, who was brilliant as the off-the-rails lawyer in Michael Clayton, does an enjoyably pungent parody of an old-style Limey villain. His Lenny looks like Noël Coward’s elegant crime lord in The Italian Job, but behaves more like Bob Hoskins’s volatile gangster-developer in The Long Good Friday. When he’s angry, Lenny is a nasty bastard, with a fondness for torturing his victims by feeding them to hungry crayfish. (Didn’t Snatch have a nasty bastard who fed his victims to pigs?) Kebbell, who played Joy Division manager Rob Gretton in Control, excels in his turn as a punk wastrel. Quid has the cadaverous body of Iggy Pop and waxes contemplative with a broody, Byronic eloquence.

Thandie Newton plays Stella, an accountant who knows how to cook the books, in RocknRolla. ( Warner Bros. Pictures)

They are the exceptions. Elba, who made such a powerful impression as Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire, barely registers here as Butler’s sidekick. Rapper Chris (Ludacris) Bridges and Entourage’s Jeremy Piven — who play a pair of U.S. record producers — aren’t given distinctive personalities. Stella – a rare female character in Ritchie’s testosterone-soaked universe – is just a sexy cartoon. Newton passes most of her screen time sounding posh and chain-smoking.

Butler, who shot to fan-boy fame battling the Persians in 300, is nondescript as the hero. His One Two is your standard-issue Celtic Jack-the-lad, but missing the sly charm of, say, Colin Farrell. Then again, Ritchie likes his leading men to be uncomplicated. (He launched Jason Statham’s career, didn’t he?)

Ritchie has always struck me as a clever lightweight. Even Lock, Stock…, his best movie, owed a lot to the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Neil Jordan and Danny Boyle — all more ambitious and original filmmakers. Still, you used to be able to count on Ritchie for flashes of wit and brio. In RocknRolla, the laughs are in short supply — unless you find amusement in One Two’s squirming homophobia around a gay mate or his displays of dancing prowess à la Elaine Benes. The comic action sequences are second-hand, too. The longest one involves One Two and Mumbles trying to kill off a pair of Russian heavies who prove as indestructible as Rasputin; it might have been funnier if the gag hadn’t already been done so much better on The Sopranos.

Speaking of television, it may be time for Ritchie to retire his signature speedball editing — the frenetic montage mixed with a slo-mo downer. It always looked a bit silly and now that the gimmick is used by mainstream TV shows like Boston Legal, it’s also embarrassingly passé.

RocknRolla doesn’t rock, it just rolls along, as predictable as another pop singer going into rehab. But if we’re tired of Ritchie’s old tricks, he apparently isn’t. The movie ends with the promise of a sequel, The Real RocknRolla. Do I hear the sound of wheels spinning?

RocknRolla opens in Toronto on Oct. 8 and across Canada on Oct. 31.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.