Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is by no means a masterpiece, but it’s a well- crafted and ingeniously entertaining comedy-thriller. It is neat, to the point, with just the right doses of action and comedy.
Simplistically, it’s a mixture of Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in its mix of mayhem, murder, black comedy and cinematic pyrotechnics. As in both those movies, there’s plenty of sassy, profane dialogue, mostly in the cockney vernacular and, as in Shallow Grave and Pulp Fiction, it all seems a little self-conscious. Nonetheless, this debut feature, written and directed by Guy Ritchie, is breezingly entertaining.
The movie is set in a grubby, working-class area of London’s East End and the complex story revolves around four layabouts who come up with a scheme to make big money by having one of them (Nick Moran) enter a poker game with gangster Hatchet Harry (PH Moriarty, who excelled as a gangster in The Long Good Friday).
Our hero’s flatmates are a bunch of wanna- be upper-classers with little semblance of employment. Says Moran:”Ritchie and I have this theory that as you get towards 30, you start to panic about where you are going in life, and winning this card game would provide all the guys with a substantial nest egg to see them through their thirties.”
After the quartet scrambles together 100 000 for the game, things go wrong and they end up owing the gangster five times the amount. >From here the plot spirals off in a dazzling array of directions, involving other gangsters, antique shotguns, upper-class louche, young dope manufacturers and loads of heavy gunfire and trickery.
There’s some great writing from Ritchie, like, ”Looks like you’ve got Liberia’s deficit in your palm,” or ”What the fuck do we know about antiques – we rob post offices,” or ”Assumption is the brother of all fuck ups”.
There are also some neat shots and styling – a guy losing at cards is racked out of focus as he realises his loss, and some fast forward motion and flash cuts towards the end show the director’s flair as a commercials and music video director.
Ritchie had problems securing finance for the movie and managed to make it with favours, loans and deferrals – it became one of the biggest grossing British movies of the year, vying against The Full Monty and Trainspotting as picks of the year.
Ritchie’s mix of dark comedy and bloodshed have obvious parallels with Tarantino and B-grade novelist and master of the heist, Elmore Leonard. The major difference is that in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels the violence and profanity is not as gut- wrenching as in its American cinematic rivals. The emphasis is rather on the colourful characters and youngsters tackling something far bigger than any of them, or all of them combined.
The major problem is that there are too many characters in the movie, so one never really gets close to any of them. But this is not a movie to be analysed too carefully – it’s a ”bloke” flick, one you can see with your mates and have a lager afterwards. In fact, the only love interest is asleep for most of the picture.
Tim Maurice-Jones cloaks the lens with an ochre look while the production design gives one a real sense of the tawdriness of London’s East End. At first it appears that the look should be complimenting a kitchen- sink drama, but there’s very little Look Back in Anger realism here – it’s a romp, pure and simple.
Although the picture is a poor successor to the Tarantinos or Boyles of the world, it’s sufficient proof that the British film industry has a great deal of spunk to deliver the kind of entertainment that beats Speed 2 or similar American action crap with verve, cutting dialogue and nigh perfect juxtaposition of comedy and gunplay.