Taking the British gangster genre to new and scary places.

Rating: 9/10 (25 August 2008)

I've always liked Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I've always admired the energy and the manner in which director Guy Ritchie doesn't necessarily tell us a brilliant story but does get across a feeling of urgency; a sense of desperate times calling for desperate measures. Lock, Stock very much falls into that mid-late nineties cannon of British crime films revolving around the youth of the day, getting mixed up in criminal activity rather than being out and out gangsters themselves. With Lock, Stock; you don't get the feeling anyone who's under the age of thirty really wants to do what they're doing, it's either for a laugh or because they're forced to.
Films such as Shopping and Trainspotting could be seen as precursors to Lock, Stock. They were crime orientated films but crime orientated films about youth getting mixed up in irregular criminal activity such as drug taking, dealing and ram-raiding. They were not gangster films about gangsters per-se like The Krays or Mona Lisa  two films from just before said films' time. However Lock, Stock combines the two ideas of youth involved in crime and the gangster genre as a whole and delivers an experience that has you sit back, put your feet up and enjoy a runtime of smart dialogue and faced paced that still worked on me all these years and viewings later. The film delivers a rapid array of scenes and visual styles more akin to music videos or perhaps even blockbusters as transitions and gimmicks fill up the screen and aid in playing out the events.
Along with Snatch. two years later, Ritchie took inspiration from Tarantino's groundbreaking Pulp Fiction and gave British audiences not so much a breath of fresh air like what Tarantino did, but an alternative  an alternative to the stuffy and somewhat clichéd image of the British gangster as a hard bodied man who ran industries and dealt with anyone who crossed him. The best moment that gives us ammunition to read into this is one of the final few scenes in the film in which an unexpected shoot out occurs in a sex shop owner's office. The 'clichéd' image of a gangster character utters the words after a great shock: "What the (expletive) are you doing here!?". This question is directed at a character of many years his junior and is a question that rings true from all 'stuffy' imagined gangster characters as Lock, Stock arrives: the 'lads culture' of the gangster genre has arrived and the old guard cannot believe it  best summed up in that one shoot out nearer the end.
But this is just fuel for an oppositional reading and I happen to have enjoyed almost all of the pre-Lock, Stock gangster films that I've seen (Brighton Rock and The Long Good Friday are my favourites). The 'criminals' in this film or at least the protagonists are young, cocky and without too much of a care. They are not criminal kingpins; they do not have an empire to run; they have not served time in jail  they have unspectacular jobs like market salesman or chef and yet they are placed in a situation against forces much higher than them and can only rely on criminal activity that just happens to be on their doorstep to bail them out.
A lot of what Ritchie does to tear apart the gangster ideation (both image and genre) is to do with comedy. A lot of the content in this film would never, ever be seen in any gangster film prior to 1998 and a lot of the humour would not be presented as being so light hearted. In this film, a 'psychotic black man with an afro' will sit behind a desk and a wall of screens displaying motorcars whilst sucking on an iced-lolly, something that both challenges what the image of a gangster might be and simultaneously tempts us to laugh at someone of this stature. Indeed when the film threatens to go 'dark' with this character over the volume of a TV in a pub, an amusing voice-over and use of subtitles distracts us from the uneasy conflict on screen. In fact it happens twice; this time the four lads of the film react with a sarcastic holler after the film's soundtrack has died for said psychotic black gangster's emphasised reply of: 'No'.
Lock, Stock at its core is a guerrilla film but it's a guerrilla film with an ideation of: 'yes, it realises what's transpired in the past and now it's going to blow away the cobwebs and do something outrageous.' But as a film and a filmmaker, Ritchie creates enough ambiguity and tension through the job itself (which is well structured: they must get through the locked gate, deal with someone hidden in the back, negotiate the disguised girl on the couch and then get away but the comic element of the traffic warden keeps everything 'light') but he also pays close attention to his soundtrack. James Brown's 'The Boss' over Big Chris' looming figure works well as does 'Liar, Liar' as Eddie blags his way through the card game with a light Reggae track over some stoners works equally well.
The film evens finds time to dedicate dialogue to the moving away from gangster films gone by. One character buys some guns of another and the seller retorts that "sawn-offs are out" further moving Lock, Stock away from that old fashioned image of Brit gangsters and their sawn-off shotguns. People want more 'range' these days is another quip  he is right but the range is in the toying with genre conventions. Apart from bending all the rules, Lock, Stock is a fast and furious ride down slapstick gangster alley that, at least for me, still holds up after so many viewings  it's just good fun among other things and Ritchie knows when to keep the film dramatic amongst everything else that happens.