"Have you forgotten those guns you dozy prat?"

Rating: 9/10 (1 July 2012)

It's the rare film that I'm compelled to watch in back to back viewings but this was one of them. The visual style, colorful language and interwoven plot threads keep you on your toes, and even though I always turn on the captions to watch a modern film, here it was completely necessary as I've never taken English as a second language. I think that's where a lot of the picture's humor comes from actually, because British slang and it's colloquialisms are so off-beat and unfamiliar to the American ear. So even though the film is liberally laced with the 'F' word, it's offensiveness almost evaporates because it doesn't come across as done for shock value but as part of Cockney sentence structure.
A word to the wise up front if you haven't seen the picture yet. Take out a pen and a sheet of paper to keep track of the players. There are a half dozen separate sets of characters here that interact with each other that are pretty distinct, but because none of the actors are very well known (at least not to me), you might have trouble keeping track of them from the outset. As things progress it gets a little easier, but having a scorecard around makes it less cumbersome to follow.
No sense going into the mechanics of the film or rehashing what the story's about, there are plenty of those reviews here already. I don't even want to draw comparisons against other films as this one is truly unique in it's style and story telling, though if you enjoy Quentin Tarantino's work you'll probably like this as well. Not for the prissy or squeamish, there's a lot of swearing, boozing, gambling and drugs on hand, but it's a memorable flick and wildly original. Recommended for multiple viewings.