*** (Out of four)

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 1999)

British former commercial auteur Guy Ritchie makes his critically-acclaimed film debut with this intriguing foreigner from the British Isles. "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" is like a British-themed homage to the many Tarantino-inspired knock-offs done in a style reminiscent of the avant-garde bands PBS used to show on Saturday evenings nearly ten years ago. Bizarrely wrapping its wraparound plot in this theme proves to add to the meticulously construed charm of elated supposed Britannian one-upmanship of the genre. The self-confidence shows in many of the film's more bizarrely shot (and somewhat overexposed) freeze-frames (most definitely the card game sequence in which one of our heroes loses a rigged poker run with a take-no-prisoners P.H. Moriarty). Terrifically essaying the very diction of Tarantino cloning through this veil of British influence turns out to be director Guy Ritchie's greatest asset.
"Lock" is set primarily in a criminally arresting and somewhat grungily Nirvanian London, a place which looks almost clockwork in everpresent style. Bright red letters almost advertising the excessive seed in each district with their very simpleness ("Harry's Sex Club"), whirling advertisements of "Minicabs" and the almost libertine freedom of motion from Tim Maurice-Jones all help to create a flicker of "never-seen-that-before!" amazement pervading this environment. Inside this desmenes lie four "mates", one a cardsharp (Nick Moran), another a future entrepreneur (Tom Flemyng), a third named Bacon (Jason Strathem) and the fourth called "Soap" because unlike his three mates, he likes to keep his fingers clean by dabbling into a legitimate occupation, baking (Dexter Fletcher). Their initial efforts to get into a poker game with the infamous Hatchet Harry (Moriarty) end up in an enormous 500,000 pound debt to be vanquished within seven days--or else. As the Clash once said, "one thing leads to another", and soon enough the entire struggle leads to, of all things, the relentless exploits of a pair of "smoking barrels".
Of course the ironic twists are one pleasure of the movie, but ironic twists does not equal charm, and this is the one of the things which "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" cannot equate with not only with its great-uncle "Pulp Fiction", but also its great-great grandparents which all contributed to Tarantino's film's fascinating pop-culture lore. One strength of the movie is its ability to juggle its various plotlines skillfully and still have time for a "30 second rock interlude" during its 108-minute running time. Indeed many of the characters elicit sympathy. One in particular is the moral thug Big Chris (Vinnie Jones) who takes his son on collecting missions and bashes his victims for swearing. These characters almost have a Dickensian feel to them in their grappling bond and ultimate fate. Hatchet Harry's back-up Barry the Baptist (Lenny McLean) reminds one of a cross between Clemenza and Don Rickles in his dogged, gleeful determination of collecting. And yet ultimately this film's sly, energetically automated sense of humor ultimately impairs one from sharing the same memories of the film's heroes, who all are so remarkably similar that they're sometimes hard to tell apart. Truly Ritchie's film is an unusual creation, and it deserves to be seen because of its out-of-left-field approach to the recent hip, Tarantino phase of filmmaking, but by strutting around the course when he should have been golfing for the hole, he prevents his film from breaking the cult masses like "Pulp Fiction" did and instead is seen as "that egocentrically stylistic British entry into film reinvigoration". Hey, even Winston Churcill was inspired by someone.