![]() ![]() Their fate hinges on a card game with mobster Hatchet Harry (Moriarty), but he's a wise old bird and by the end of the evening they're half a million in debt. Moriarty, and the nasty enforcer Big Chris is played by an English soccer star named Vinnie Jones, evidently famous during his sporting days for head-butting opponents unconscious.Four East End lads (Moran, Flemyng, Statham and Fletcher) are desperate to get sumfin' for nuffin'. Hatchet Harry is unpleasantly realized by P.H. I would give you the character names, but what difference would it make? The actors are Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher. Astutely these four actors have separate bone structures and haircuts (or hair colorings), so it's easy to tell them apart. If you don't like one, relax you'll probably like the next one seven seconds later.Īcting is hardly the point, but the fellows who play the living-lout cartoons are generally effective in a one-dimensional way. It's a running, jumping and standing-still film, but most of the running, jumping and standing still is done in the editing room, where the director tries every trick ever invented. Think of "Lock, Stock" as "A Hard Day's Night" with sawed-off shotguns. Ritchie has probably seen every movie ever made, but he's seen all of Tarantino's twice and all of Richard Lester's three times. And there are even more bodies put into play: two burglars, the crime lord's gang of louts, the son of one of the enforcers (learning the family trade), a zonked girl on a couch who just happens to know the firing drill for a Bren gun, and a poor parking cop who bumbles into all this mayhem and is punched silly by every set of louts. Eventually, all these bodies are set in motion and bounce and careen across London's East End, guns blazing, cars crashing and cockney patois denser than London fog filling the air. ![]() So our four decide to rob the four louts who have just robbed the Eton boys. Now it happens our four live next door to another four much cheekier, creepier louts, who plan to rob yet another set of four louts, simple-headed Eton boys who grow jujuweed in the basement and are backed by a crime lord and have acquired a major store of cash. Our heroes are the least objectionable of at least four separate sets of louts, but they're in the worst trouble because one of them is cheated by Hatchet Harry in a high-stakes poker game, so they owe Harry a nasty boy, with two different enforcers half a million pounds ($800,000), which they must raise in a week. You might call it a comedy of louts, or a lout-o-rama. It has the murky, muddy color scheme of faded travelogues from the '50s like "South Africa: Land of Flowers and Sunshine." It's lit by four flashlights, a candle and the reflection off somebody's glasses. It appears to be shot on film stock discovered in a sunken freighter in the Channel. Still, Ritchie's "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" is a considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while. It's one reason why there isn't an England anymore they've gone bonkers trying to be us. ![]() The corrupter, of course, is Quentin Tarantino, and now English filmmakers like Guy Ritchie are trying their best at the lowlife, profanity-driven, gun-crazed, postmodernist, drop-dead hipster comedy stylings that Tarantino patented in "Reservoir Dogs." I am happy to report that the real corrupter has spread his influence to Great Britain. 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' (R)įour blokes from London star in "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."Įxtreme, if playful and foolish, violence and the F-word inserted at least twice into each line of dialogue
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