Innovative, original, one of my favorites.

Rating: 10/10 (24 April 2003)

When I first saw this movie shorty after it hit the US shores, I was really disappointed. I thought it was boring, uninteresting and hard to follow. About a year later I gave it another try. Lo and behold it became one of my top 5 movies (with the company of Boondock Saints, Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, and The Shawshank Redemption). It took awhile for me to piece it all together, but the plot is very clever and probably one of my favorites ever. The acting is great, the one liners are great, the soundtrack is EXCELLENT (the Dusty Springfield and James Brown fit in so well to the style of the film), the characters were memorable (not quite as cartoonish as in SNATCH, which is good). I've seen this movie more times than I've seen any other, and I love it each time. It's one of three movies that I find myself "preaching", along with Boondock Saints and Taxi Driver, as many people have not seen them.
I have to strongly disagree with many of the comments I read that Guy Ritchie copied Tarantino in making this film. This film is a completely different animal than Pulp Fiction. This is a crime caper/comedy, while Pulp Fiction is just a "day in the life" of a group of characters. Pulp Fiction really doesn't have much of a plot; it relies heavily on its everyday dialogue and out of sequence storytelling, but things just sort of fall into place. Lock Stock is intricate heist, which flows in chronological order, for that matter. People seem to call this movie a Pulp Fiction clone simple because several groups of characters fates are intertwined. Movies that clearly "borrow" from Pulp Fiction include Boondock Saints, Go, and Memento (all some of my favorite films, by the way), because of their out-of-sequence storytelling.
But this isn't a review for Pulp Fiction, now is it? In the end, this movie is original, smart, funny, all around entertaining, and completely enjoyable. I give it 10/10 (while I don;t overuse a score of 10 like some people, out of all the films I've seen, I've allotted the score 6 times). Rent, buy, rent again, watch a hundred times.