Review of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) by Blake P — 10 Mar 2016

Oh, what an ear Guy Ritchie has. Though not a fan of the walls that confine a comprehensible plot, Ritchie may as well be the Brit Tarantino when it comes to dialogue. Gifted in his ability to craft conversations characterized by a daunting mixture of street guy toughness, blackened humor, and ironic prudence, listening to his characters speak is something like hearing a virtuoso violinist perfervidly perform Johan Sebastian Bach's Chaconne from Partita in D Minor, hardly breaking a sweat. What a joy it is to watch a film where colloquy is everything, where characters are vehicles for bravura dialogue to travel in.

The film, 1999's "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels," was the first for the now cultishly beloved Ritchie, who kept his cheeky stride with 2001's similar "Snatch" but lost it all after marrying Madonna and throwing his career away in 2003 with "Swept Away," a misguided attempt to combine work and play. After "Snatch's" release, he's come close to matching the initial triumphs of his first two releases ("Sherlock Holmes" brought him much needed commercial success, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." showcasing him as an immensely capable talent-for-hire), but nothing takes the place of "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels," whose vitality and crotchety humor makes it as punchy of a crackpot crime comedy as it was back in '99.

Its hard-to-follow plot, a familiar case of too many characters and too many stories, is its weak link, preventing us from feeling that internal cackle that follows suit after undergoing something like "Jackie Brown," which was similarly complicated but nevertheless straightforward and rewarding to keep up with. There comes a point during "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" in which the hurricane of thick British accents and bafflements of the intersecting stories becomes too much, us having to throw our hands up in surrender to its byzantine ways. But its delightful performances and saucy dialogue never lose their introductory charisma - getting lost in its setup is very much a possibility, but tiring of its personality is certainly not.

The film concerns the misadventures of a pocket of East End thugs, who match in their tendencies to blunder but who vary in their callousness. Most conspicuously featured are Eddy (Nick Moran), Bacon (Jason Statham), Tom (Jason Flemyng), and Soap (Dexter Fletcher), low-lifes who unwisely devise a plan to earn enough money to land Eddy a spot on the poker table of porn producer Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty). So intrigued by the prospect of winning big that they forget that Eddy could, you know, lose, we get the feeling that the twenty somethings are way in over their heads.

And we'd be right - Eddy doesn't end a victor and instead becomes a victim of the payback. By the end of the week, he is expected to give Harry an obnoxious amount of cash; Harry, aware that the young man foolish enough to go against him likely won't be able to put his money where his mouth is, eyes his father's bar for purchase. But Eddy and his pals are virilely forlorn, eventually landing on the idea of stealing from a local gangster's (Steven Mackintosh) marijuana business. Connoisseurs of the heist they aren't, though, and the hot water around them gets even hotter the more they try to get Eddy out of his debt.

A bevy of characters are further introduced, but to list them all off, describing their individual roles in driving the labyrinthine plot, would be tiresome and maybe even worthless; most likely, you won't be able to keep up with "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" any better than me. You will, however, remain enthralled by its exchanges and its characters - I love the way Ritchie is able to make even the most wearisome of a conversational detail pop with knowing panache, and I love the chutzpah of the performers, especially Statham, then a newcomer, Vinnie Jones, a brawny toughie, and Vas Blackwood, who, with delicious camp, plays a crime boss of unusual merit. So while "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" is not the direct escapism most hunt for to spend a couple of hours with, its exhibition is unmissable; had Ritchie continued on the path set by it, then he might have been a living legend. But there are worse ways to be remembered.