My wife and I saw RocknRolla Saturday. It was moderately fun, but slow and confusing at times, and not as fun as Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch; but that’s not the reason I’m blogging about it. Rather, some of the characters were supposed to be Russian, and the subtitles for some of the Russian dialogue were sometimes completely different from the spoken dialogue itself.
It’s not just that the spoken dialogue was a mistranslation of the subtitle (there were a few possible instances of that, but I wasn’t referring to that); in a few instances, the dialogue just didn’t match the subtitle at all. I recall, for instance, one shot in which the subtitle is something like “give me the gloves,” and the spoken Russian is “I don’t trust her.” In another scene, where two Russians are comparing war wounds and describing their sources, the subtitle is “barbed wire” and the spoken Russian is “land mine.”
Naturally this doesn’t materially affect how enjoyable the movie is, even to the very few Russian speakers who see it. But it did strike me as odd. Here’s the one explanation I could think of: At some point after the movie was shot, the subtitles were rewritten — presumably on the grounds that the new version was somehow better, or better matched the visible action — but the filmmaker concluded that there was no real benefit in reshooting the scene or in dubbing over the dialogue. Does that make sense?