Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a 1998 neo-noir black comedy crime film written and directed by Guy Ritchie. It follows a heist involving a confident young card sharp who loses £500,000 to a powerful crime lord in a rigged game of three-card brag, prompting him to pay off his debts by enlisting his friends to help him rob a small-time gang operating out of the apartment next door. It stars an ensemble cast featuring Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Steven Mackintosh, Vinnie Jones, and Sting.
The film brought Ritchie international acclaim and introduced Statham (a former diver) and Jones (a former footballer) to worldwide audiences in their feature film debuts. It was also a commercial success, grossing over $28 million at the box office against a $1.35 million budget. A television spin-off called Lock, Stock... followed in 2000, running for seven episodes.
Long-time friends and small-time London criminals Eddie, Tom, Soap, and Bacon put together £100,000 so that Eddie, a card sharp, can participate in one of "Hatchet" Harry Lonsdale's high-stakes three-card brag games. The game, however, is rigged and they wind up owing £500,000 to Harry, to be paid within a week. Harry sends his debt collector Big Chris to Eddie's father JD, since Harry's true intention is to acquire JD's bar in payment of the debt.
Also interested in two expensive antique Holland & Holland shotguns up for auction, Harry gets his enforcer Barry "the Baptist" to hire two thieves, Gary and Dean, to steal them from a bankrupt lord. After the incompetent thieves unwittingly sell them to Nick "the Greek", a local fence, Barry threatens them into retrieving the guns. Meanwhile, Eddie returns home and overhears his neighbours, a gang of robbers led by a brutal man called "Dog", planning a heist on some cannabis growers loaded with cash and drugs. He tells the other three and they decide to rob the neighbours after they return from their heist. Tom buys the shotguns from Nick (both unaware of their true value), for use in the plan.
Dog's gang execute their heist, and despite a gang member's death by his own Bren gun and an incriminating encounter with a traffic warden, they succeed, returning with a duffel bag full of money and a van loaded with bags of cannabis. Eddie and his friends ambush them and escape in the van containing the cannabis and the warden. They transfer the loot to their own van and return home, knocking out the warden and dumping him by the road before arranging for Nick to fence the drugs to violent gangster Rory Breaker. Rory agrees to buy the cannabis at half price but two of his men visit the house of the growers, discover that they have been robbed and the cannabis he just bought has been stolen from his own growers. Rory threatens Nick into giving him Eddie's address and tasks one of the two surviving growers, Winston, to identify the robbers.
While the friends celebrate at JD's bar, Dog's crew, having accidentally discovered that they were robbed by their neighbours, set up an ambush in Eddie's flat. Rory and his gang arrive at the flat instead and in the ensuing shoot-out, all except Dog and Winston are killed. Winston leaves with the drugs. Dog attempts to escape with the shotguns and the cash but Big Chris arrives, incapacitates him, and takes both. Attempting to recover the guns, Gary and Dean follow Chris, oblivious to the fact that Chris is bringing them to Harry.
Having delivered the money and guns to Harry, Chris returns to his car to find Dog holding his son Little Chris at knifepoint, demanding the cash be returned to him. Chris complies and starts the car. Meanwhile, Gary and Dean burst into Harry's office. The ensuing confrontation results in the deaths of Gary, Dean, Barry and Harry. Having discovered the carnage at their flat and their loot missing, the four friends head to Harry's office, finding a second set of corpses, and decide to take the money for themselves. Chris deliberately crashes into their car to disable Dog and then fatally bludgeons him with his car door. He then retrieves the cash from the unconscious Eddie but allows Tom to leave with the shotguns after a brief stand-off.
The friends are arrested but soon released after the warden identifies Dog and his crew as the culprits. Back at the bar, Eddie, Bacon and Soap dispatch Tom to discard the guns, as they are the only remaining evidence linking them to the case. While Tom is away, Chris arrives to announce his intentions of leaving the friends alone, but warns them not to seek him out in the future. Chris then returns the bag, from which he has taken all the cash for himself and his son and which is now empty save for a catalogue of antique weapons. Leafing through the catalogue, the three friends learn that the shotguns are actually far more valuable than they had realised and frantically call Tom to dissuade him from disposing of them. The film ends with Tom leaning over Battersea Bridge, holding his mobile phone ringing in his mouth, as he attempts to drop the guns into the River Thames.
The soundtrack to the film was released in 1998 in the United Kingdom by Island Records. Madonna's Maverick Records label released the soundtrack in the United States in 1999 but omitted nine tracks from the UK release.
* Track omitted from 1999 US release.
The production of the film followed Guy Ritchie's single short film which preceded Lock, Stock. As stated in filmscouts.com:
A one-hour documentary of the production of the film was released featuring much of the cast along with Ritchie.
Locations include Shoreditch for the gang hideout and Clerkenwell for JD's bar.
The film was Lenny McLean's final film appearance, as he died in July 1998, shortly before the film's release.
Summit Entertainment acquired worldwide rights to the film excluding the UK upon its premiere at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, with PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, which already held UK rights, acquiring distribution rights for North America (with PolyGram-subsidiary Gramercy Pictures distributing the film in the United States), Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, the Benelux, France, Spain and Switzerland from Summit, with Summit handling international sales in all other regions.
The film was released on 28 August 1998 in the United Kingdom and was the second-highest grossing local production for the year behind Sliding Doors with a gross of $18.9 million. It was released on 5 March 1999 in the United States, where its total gross was $3,753,929 (equivalent to $7,085,672 in 2024).
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 75% based on 67 reviews, with an average rating of 6.70/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is a grimy, twisted, and funny twist on the Tarantino hip gangster formula". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on 30 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
John Ferguson in Radio Times called the film "the best British crime movie since The Long Good Friday". Roger Ebert in Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "Lock, Stock is fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive".
The film was nominated for a British Academy Film Award in 1998 for the outstanding British Film of the Year. In 1999, it was nominated for a Brit Award for Soundtrack/Cast Recording. In 2000, Ritchie won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. In 2004, Total Film named it the 38th greatest British film of all time. In 2016, Empire magazine ranked Lock, Stock 75th on their list of the 100 best British films.
A spin-off television series, co-written by Ritchie was developed for Channel 4. The show featured a new cast of characters: Moon, Jamie, Bacon, and Lee (portrayed by Daniel Caltagirone, Scott Maslen, Shaun Parkes, and Del Synnott, respectively); who comedically fail at various criminal business ventures, similar to the cast of the feature film. Lock, Stock... aired from May 29 through July 11, 2000.