The most overrated film of 1998, nay the decade.

Rating: Null/10 (2 March 1999)

8.4 out of 10? The 'Empire' award for Best British Film of 1998?
It's being made into a TV series? I rate it as about 3 out of 10, give it the 'Me' award for most overrated film of the decade, and would like to see it being used as a textbook example of what can go wrong if you allow surface to take over substance in a movie. The acting (with the surprising exception of Vinnie Jones) was uniformly TERRIBLE. The accents and intonation were, in several cases, laughable public schoolboy cockney parodies; a Michael Caine impression does not a Cockney make. Obviously these boys realise that they just don't have the talent to carry off an original performance, and resorted to character theft from "Alfie".
The assumption has to be that Guy Ritchie, the director, used to make a lucrative career in music videos and commercials, and I bet they were pretty good too. He obviously has a visual flair, although, if "Lock, Stock" is anything to go by, originality isn't his strong point (the giddy scene taken directly from "Mean Streets"?).
The story was at best old hat and at worst sketched in after the producers decided to make a good looking film about characters that we've all seen before, in situations that we've all seen before.
None of this would be so bad if the British cinema-going public hadn't sapped it in and mistaken it for Film Art rather than Film Fart.
The British Film Industry has long been accused of making too many 'pretty' period films, but this has to be a far more damning vacuous 'pretty postcard' of a film than any Merchant-Ivory production.