Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Written and Directed by Guy Ritchie
Starring Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher and Vinnie Jones

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Eddie Bunker, who exudes sweetness, and Lawrence Tierney, who mostly seems like an asshole, are the only actual, convicted criminals to act in the first few Quentin Tarantino movies (Peter Greene had dependency issues and did time much later, in 2007). Those films are full of tough characters, but they mostly have silly haircuts and they're wearing nice suits and they have complicated opinions about pop culture marginalia. They aren't scary. Every bad guy in the 1998 Pulp Fiction rip-off Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, on the other hand, looks like Satan.

This movie marked the debut of writer-director Guy Ritchie, whose early aesthetic revolved around moving Tarantino scenarios to England. At least for a little while, he had something Tarantino never did: grime. London looks like an open-air public restroom here. The film stock is grainy and the color palette is all browns and dark greens. Jason Statham, who would quickly become one of the great movie badasses of his generation, stars alongside at least five other actors who look like they could rip his head off. The Reservoir Dogs thieves coordinated so they could all wear the same suit to their heist while the Lock, Stock guys all show up in dirty trench coats.

That doesn't mean this film isn't slick. It is. The plot is tight and the characters are quippy in a way that sometimes gets a little too cute. There are shots where everybody isn't fully in frame and you can't be sure whether it's a choice or Ritchie and his crew really just didn't quite know what they were doing, but there are also perfectly-executed slow motion shots and needle drop moments that must have accounted for an unreasonable percentage of the film's budget. But everything looks dirty, and that can go a long way in a heist movie.

There are, essentially, six groups of criminals roaming around Lock, Stock's London. Some of them have stories so slight you'd struggle to call them stories. This is not a bad thing. The plot is more complicated on paper than it is on screen, but here we go. The primary characters are:

• The protagonists, played by Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Dexter Fletcher and Jason Flemyng, are friends who pool their money so one of them can enter a high-stakes poker game. The game is rigged, they fall into debt and decide to rob their neighbors to get out of it.

• The crime bosses, played by P.H. Moriarty and Lenny McLean, run and rig that poker game and, on the side, are trying to steal a couple expensive shotguns about to go up for auction.

• Two bumbling criminals, played by Jake Abraham and Victor McGuire, are hired by the crime bosses to get the shotguns. They get the shotguns, accidentally sell them and have to steal them back.

• A father-son duo, played by Vinnie Jones and Peter McNicholl, are enforcers for the crime bosses and threaten the protagonists to make sure they settle their debt.

• The protagonists' neighbors, played by Frank Harper, Steve Sweeney, Huggy Lever and a guy whose face you maybe see once, who go around robbing and beating people, including their weed dealers.

• Their weed dealers, played by Steven Mackintosh, Nicholas Rowe and Charles Forbes, who grow drugs in their house and don't do a great job hiding it.

There are free agent characters, like Nick The Greek (Stephen Marcus), a fence who unwittingly connects a few storylines, and Rory Breaker (Vas Blackwood), a wiry psychopath with Katt Williams energy with a stake in the weed dealers' business, but almost everybody belongs to a gang. Perhaps that's the reason it doesn’t quite have the feel of its great UK crime movie forebears like The Long Good Friday or Get Carter. I think the best of those are generally about loners scrambling around in desperate situations-- a synthesis of hardboiled crime's bitter anger and noir's loneliness. The tone is lighter here, there’s more camaraderie and less backstabbing. People rely on their friends.

Helpfully, they also stick with their friends. If one of the guys from the neighbor gang was wandering around on his own, you could mistake him for one of the weed dealers or the bumbling criminals, but these characters move as units. They're barely characterized outside of their various placements on the tough guy spectrum, but they're recognizable as groups and when you see them, you know what they're supposed to be doing.

The characters really only exist to say cool things and smash into each other with style. Ritchie was a lot more visually showy here than Tarantino would ever get. Lock, Stock is full of weird camera placements, freeze frames, split-screens, sped up montages and big music moments perfectly synched to the action. The poker game that sets the main story in motion could be isolated as a music video, which makes it surprising Ritchie never made that many of them.

The dialogue itself is mostly fine, even if Ritchie falls into this quicksand pattern Tarantino would also abuse:

Character A: "What is that, [Character B]?"
Character B: "It’s [ridiculous thing]."
Character A: "I can see it’s [ridiculous thing]. What’s it doing in [location]?"

The language itself is great for a dumb American like me. I'm easily pleased by Cockney rhyming slang. Saying "sky rocket" to mean "pocket?" Terrific. I hear it and clap like a baby looking in a mirror. The language also creates a little barrier to entry I'm able to use as an excuse for any confusion. When things get too convoluted, I get to excuse having lost track of the plot on my inability to fully parse the quasi-foreign language everybody's speaking.

Luckily, nobody ever gets so talky that it overwhelms the action. These characters, portrayed by former boxers and criminals and infamously violent football players, throw off little quips, but they're mostly hitting each other with golf clubs and sex toys. That doesn't mean the movie doesn't know when to slow down. There a couple of the kind of excellent long sequences that I've praised Tarantino for. In my favorite, the neighbor gang breaks into the weed dealers' house. It's a brutal robbery with gigantic guns, but most of it takes place in the house's foyer, with the gang stuck behind a security gate and the dealers frantically trying to get them to leave.

Like every location, the house is dark and cluttered. It seems less like the main room was thoughtfully art directed and more like somebody emptied a random thrift store's stock on top of a few old couches. As the scene, which owes a heavy debt to Pulp Fiction's "What?" sequence, slowly progresses, Ritchie lets us in on a secret: One of the dealers' girlfriends is half-awake on one of the couches and she's sitting close to a machine gun that would look ostentatious in a Cannon action movie. Inevitably, she grabs it and fires.

Ritchie's very good about sticking a loaded gun, metaphorically and/or literally, into every scene. There's always a good chance violence is going to ring out. All these brutes navigate through dirty backrooms and Ritchie floats just above it all, ready to film in slow motion or use a little trick to let us know just how bad everything can and will break. It's an incredibly watchable film.

• The Year is 1998: I know ska is a different, more evergreen thing in England than it is in America, but I am American, I associate the term with Reel Big Fish and The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones more than I do The Specials or The Selecter, and Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn's production company “Ska Films” reads as a thoroughly 1998 thing to me. I was born in suburban California in 1989. You say "ska" and I hear a nine month period across 1997 and 1998.

• Tarantino defectors: None. It would be bizarre if a British movie made for £800,000 had any cast crossover with Tarantino's first few movies, but then...

• Weirdest member of the ensemble: ... it's bizarre that this little movie has a supporting role for Sting. It's a bunch of fresh faces, a brutal football player, some old former criminals and a galactically famous pop star. Sting reportedly enjoyed Ritchie's 1995 short film The Hard Case and wanted to get involved in whatever was next. He's in Lock, Stock for all of ten minutes, but he gets to stare down a bad guy and put the main characters in their place. You can see a guy with Sting's ego only agreeing to be in your movie if you make his character a badass who doesn't have enough many lines but does get to glower a bunch.

• Weirdest pop culture reference: Two characters reference Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in a half-correct, Big Lebowski way.

• Most Tarantino moment: It has to be the long montage set to the main theme from "Zorba The Greek,'' It's a bunch of storylines colliding in a bloodbath, which is a device Tarantino's used from True Romance to Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood. The ultimate Tarantino rip-off signifier exists beyond the movie: its soundtrack CD has little dialogue snippets between the songs.

• Needle drop set piece: There are a few great ones, but my favorite is "I Wanna Be Your Dog" playing as Eddie loses the last hand at the big poker game and realizes he's in deep debt to a violent mob boss. Ron Asheton's guitar is the perfect grungy, scuzzy soundtrack to a cruel reversal of fortune.

• Innovations in the subgenre: Back to that "Zorba The Greek" sequence-- it's Ritchie using another film's score in his own work. Lock, Stock also includes a snippet of music from A Few Dollars More. Tarantino didn't do that until Kill Bill in 2003.

• Most ridiculous line of dialogue: This is from a scene with intentionally impenetrable Cockney slang, but I can't resist: "A few nights ago Rory's Roger iron's rusted. He's gone down the battle-cruiser to watch the end of a football game. Nobody is watching the custard so he turns the channel over. A fat geezer's north opens. He wanders up and turns the liza over. 'Now fuck off and watch it somewhere else.' Rory knows claret is imminent, but he doesn't want to miss the end of the game. So, calm as a coma, picks up a fire extinguisher, walks straight past the jam rolls who are ready for action and he plonks it outside the entrance. He then orders an Aristotle of the most ping pong tiddly in the nuclear sub and switches back to his footer. 'That's fucking it,' says the geezer. 'That's fucking what?' says Rory. And he gobs out a mouthful of booze covering fatty. He flicks a flaming match into his bird's nest and the geezer's lit up like a leaking gas pipe. Rory, unfazed, turned back to his game. His team's won too. Four-nil."

• Does it work? Definitely. It's a perfectly fun time, which isn't something you can say for Guy Ritchie's later movies. This one, when Ritchie was at his most referential, is set piece after set piece and the worst of them is still pretty great. For me, it holds up better than Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or True Romance.

• Where did the writer/director go? To the live action Aladdin movie with a Will Smith Genie. You could easily make the case that Ritchie has the weirdest career of any director of his generation. He made a few more Impossible Royales (Snatch, RocknRolla), a famous bomb with then-wife Madonna (Swept Away), the Sherlock Holmes movies and a couple would-be franchise starters that people are always arguing deserve more attention (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). He's currently making spy movies (Operation Fortune, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) and a thriller set during the War in Afghanistan (The Covenant). Ritchie makes tough guy movies, but you can't really call things like Aladdin or Swept Away outliers. Yeah, it's mostly heist and spy movies, but there are enough detours that you can't pigeonhole him as the guy who just makes those two things. The Sherlock Holmes films grossed close to a billion dollars. Ritchie's made 15 movies since 1998 and that filmography looks like it came from at least three different people.

• Left behind: Nobody really got left behind. Jason Flemyng didn't become the international superstar this film teed him up to be, but he's still a prolific actor. Dexter Fletcher directed Rocketman and took over Bohemian Rhapsody after everybody remembered how terrible Bryan Singer is. Vinnie Jones played the heavy in every dumb action movie released between 2001 and 2014. Jason Statham became Jason Statham. Producer Matthew Vaughn revitalized the X-Men movies for a while and made the fun Kingsman series. In some ways, the only real answer here is Sting. Sting hasn't had a great film career since 1998. He's a lot of fun in The Sweatbox, a 2002 documentary his wife made about the long, messy creation of The Emperor's New Groove, but otherwise he mostly plays himself in winking cameos. I'm sure he'd trade touring arenas for a few more roles like the one he has in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.