Guy Ritchie's directorial debut Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is a work of artistic originality as well as an accurate portrayal of life as an Eastender.

Rating: 7/10 (11 December 2009)

Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is too mixed-up to synopsise easily and too rickety to think about closely, but it gets plenty of laughs as it rushes from scene to scene. The story is about a heist involving a self-confident young card sharp who loses £500,000 to a powerful crime lord in a rigged game of three card brag. In order to pay off his debts, he and his friends decide to rob a small-time gang who happen to be operating out of the flat next door.
This crime caper has not a great deal of originality or heart, but displays an undeniable energy as its cast of memorable faces duck and dive between narrative entanglements. Unhappily, its massive success opened the floodgates to a wave of dismal British gangster movies. A television series, Lock, Stock..., followed in 2000.