cool for cool's own sake

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2004)

"Lock, Stock..." falls into a category of movies that I particularly loathe - the movies that are cool for the sake of being cool. There is no other attraction here: the plot is garbled, the characters clichéd, the dialog barely comprehensible. We must like this movie, though, because it's just so dang *cool.*
Or we could watch something good, right? I mean, honestly, what is the appeal of this story? A bunch of low-level gangster losers get into debt, and totally unrealistic criminal hijinks ensue. The plot twists are too numerous and too silly, as are the characters - I dare you to even keep track of which stupid thugs are in which bozo gang.
That is not to say that I hated the movie - I still have the cheap DVD in my collection - but I certainly wasn't impressed. This kind of movie - violent, foul-mouthed, pointless - really defines the 1990s as a decade in cinema terms, and a very bleak decade it was. Virtually any realistic, well-acted crime movie of the 1970s is really far superior to this kind of...what would you call it, exactly? Teenie-gangster fare?