Review of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) by Edith N — 22 Dec 2010

Unnecessarily Complicated and People Who Are Morons.

It's one of the problems I have with your standard crime movie, really. I just want to slap sense into the various characters. Oh, not many of them are equipped for Life on the Straight and Narrow, naturally. Most of them could hold a day job for less time than I would. I do acknowledge all this. But that's basic personality in most cases. Yet somehow, in this movie and in so many others, their basic personality seems framed around the fact that they're just kind of stupid. The end of this movie seems more than a little contrived, but on the other hand, it also seems to me that about a minute of research would have cleared things right up long before they reached the pass they did. The word "antique" is even thrown out a time or two, and it's quite clear that these people know that antiques are valuable.

Really, I had a hard time keeping track of the plot, and I certainly don't much remember character names. As near as I can work out, one of the characters--Eddie, I believe, played by Nick Moran--gets conned into a game wherein he is set up by Hatchet Harry (P. H. Moriarty), I think, to lose big time. He is then told to either produce half a million pounds essentially within days or to turn over his dad's pub, which is clearly the actual goal. And his dad is played by Sting, because why not? There are also lazy pot growers incompetent to be involved in criminal undertakings, two guys who are charged with stealing the contents of someone's gun cabinet, I think also by Harry, and various other complicated twists of plot. It does about entirely get resolved in the end, except maybe one little bit, but it mostly gets resolved by a lot of people's getting shot.

Really, I don't see the staggering originality that some people claim for it. Oh, it's got clever use of language in places, but there's nothing really original about that. Certainly it's not original to have the characters in a movie speak in a patois unfamiliar to the majority of the audience but still relatively understandable. (Though it was subtitled at least once!) Indeed, I'd say that's important for any movie purporting to show any real criminal subculture. Every profession has its own jargon, and in this case, it's most important to hide real intentions, plans, and other discussions from idle listeners and especially the police. To me, it's the one without dialogue like this that seems artificial.

And then there's the violence. There is assuredly nothing original about that. Even the stylistic filming thereof. There is considerable debate about how much of his style is just a ripoff of Quentin Tarantino; how much you think it is depends, so far as I am concerned, about how much you like Guy Ritchie versus Quentin Tarantino. I am not enormously fond of either, so believe me when I say that it's quite plainly inspired by Tarantino's style but not of it. For one thing, [i]Pulp Fiction[/i]--the film most commonly cited as an influence--really has very little onscreen violence. This has a body count of sixteen, and I'm not sure if that's just onscreen deaths or people overall. I suspect the former, but that may be just because it feels as though almost the entire cast dies, and there's a big cast. If you think about it, hardly anyone dies in [i]Pulp Fiction[/i], either, and it's only one character to whom you're supposed to have a connection.

Apparently, Guy Ritchie doesn't like any film made by a film school graduate. Says they're all boring and predictable. And, looking over Wikipedia's "notable alumni" lists from the film schools at NYU, USC and UCLA, I can kind of see where he's coming from for some of them. On the other hand, quite a lot of the greatest living directors went to school at one of the three. Scorsese. Coppola. Joel Coen. (Not Ethan, but they only have a joint Wikipedia page, so they apparently are only one person anyway.) James Ivory of Merchant Ivory. George Lucas, though of course that gets into a whole other argument. John Singleton, whose career has been erratic but who holds a place near to my heart. Spike Lee. Heck, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek both went to UCLA! Do I think Guy Ritchie's films would be better if he went to film school? That, I can't answer. But not all film school graduates make bad films.