Ritchie's best

Rating: 9/10 (22 June 2012)

Guy Ritchie's feature length debut might just be his finest directorial effort of them all. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is about a group of four friends who pool their money together to play in a high stakes poker game. However, things don't go according to plan and they end up owing 500,000 pounds to the owner of a porn shop in downtown London. The worst part... they only have a week to get him the money or they'll have their digits cut off one by one until their fingerless, toeless, and maybe noseless. And so the group of clowns come up with a hair brained scheme to come up with this hefty sum of cash, and what they come up with is twisty, wacky, and violently hilarious.
At the beginning of the movie we meet our four protagonists, as well as a cavalcade of other characters who all seem to be totally unrelated. But as the story progresses everyone we meet at the beginning of the film serves a purpose and the way the characters intertwine and the way their stories develop through a series of mix-ups, misunderstandings, and wrong place at the wrong time scenarios is absolutely brilliant. Rarely do you see such refined work in big heist storytelling that manages to be intriguing and enthralling, but also possess a dash of something else. A streak of black humor that makes you cringe and laugh at the same time and a thick layer of wicked action and brutal violence. It's incredibly exciting, and wildly entertaining.
One of the strongest elements of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is the script, which is riddled with slang, one liners, and character nuances that make every scenario and every person in the film unique. There's a very specific cadence to the way the characters talk in the film with their thick cockney accents and their love of word play, similes, and all other sorts of figurative language. There's a real clever ingenuity behind all the laughs and all the bloodshed, and it makes this film something like we don't usually see. It's an action comedy that doesn't use cheap gags or easy laughs, but it's also a grandiose heist story that doesn't make things too overly complicated, but brings in enough elements to the story to make your head spin. But it's the good kind of spinning. The one that enthralls you into the story and the one that makes you love every minute of this incredibly excellent film.