Mr Madonna's Finest Hour

Rating: 6/10 (2 July 2006)

I haven't exactly followed Guy Ritchie's career since "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels". After going to see "Snatch", which treads similar ground to "Lock Stock", I decided that Mr Ritchie was a Johnny-One-Note.
That first note, however, was a good'un.
"Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels" is NOT a great movie. I daresay that in 20 or 30 year's time it will look horribly dated and the dialogue will require subtitling. The pop-video direction and editing will also mark it as the work of another 90's-era hack director making the transition into "proper" cinema.
On the plus side, the viewer is treated to a very humorous script and a bizarre view of the hinterland where ordinary folk rub along with the criminal classes. Mr Ritchie succeeds in creating a world where all the characters seem to talk like Del Boy without it getting on yer bleedin' tits after the first half hour. In fact, the movie marks the point where everyone who lived and worked in London began dropping their aitches wholesale. Within weeks of the film's release, all the corporate City types in the coffee shops and pubs around the Lloyds Building had gone from Oxford English to sounding like Big Chris and Nick the Greek. You can't buy a cultural impact like that, although the producers of "Snatch" gave it a go.
A fine cast puts meat on the bones of their characters, with the exception of one Jason Statham. Mr Statham plays a slab of beef, a role that he was asked to reprise (and did so willingly, it seems) in "Snatch". There is also a leaden cameo from the partner of one of the film's producers, none other than Sting. Bearing in mind this guy's energetic and unhinged turns in films like "Dune" and "Brimstone and Treacle", Sting's performance here is phoned in.
"Lock Stock" was such a hit and such an influential and innovative movie that it set off a tidal wave of derivative and mostly inferior Brit gangster flicks that took about 6 years to peter out. That was Guy Ritchie's biggest hurdle, and one that he has yet to overcome. When your first big movie is such a barnstorming success, where do you go after that?