Viking Night:
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
By Bruce Hall
September 28, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There are basically two types of heist film. There’s the one where the criminals are brilliant specialists pitted against an equally cunning and ruthless adversary. The two sides clash, dance and engage in an intellectual chess match so exhilarating it almost makes you want to become a jewel thief yourself. And then there’s the kind where the criminals are complete idiots, in over their heads and outmatched at every turn. You root for them because everyone likes an underdog, but if you ever harbored dreams of being a master larcenist there’s no better proof that crime doesn’t pay. A great example of the first type is the drama Ocean’s Eleven. No, not the 1960 version where the Rat Pack decided got together for drinks and – oh yeah – made a movie. I mean the good one. The second type is almost always a comedy of some kind, and includes films like A Fish Called Wanda, lovingly populated with wall to wall morons, and the subject of this week’s column: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Lock, Stock is a movie that came into being at the hind end of the Tarantinoverse, which is what I like to call the period in the late '90s when just about every budget ensemble crime caper reminded you in some way of Pulp Fiction. But despite the chorus of detractors who label Guy Ritchie a usurper, it really isn’t a fair comparison. Lock, Stock stands out thanks to its pedigree; clever humor and colorful, offbeat characters are hardly unique to American cinema. British crime classics like The Italian Job and Get Carter weren’t just favorites in the U.K., they resonated with moviegoers and film makers on both sides of the pond. And they contribute their DNA to this slightly vapid but entertaining classic that spawned its own cottage industry of imitators without really breaking any new ground itself. Also, if you’re Ritchie, when your first film nets you almost 20 times its budget and gets you married to Madonna it’s fair to say that you nailed it – and you nailed it big time.
Despite the film’s hectic editing and convoluted dialogue, the plot is really pretty simple. It centers on four slackers, Bacon (Jason Statham), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), Tom (Jason Flemyng) and Eddy (Nick Moran), who are looking for a way to get rich quick. The boys manage to cobble together £100,000 and rather than betting it on a horse, they enter Eddy into a high stakes card game against a local thug named Harry the Hatchet (P.H. Moriarty). Eddy is well known in town as an ace with the cards but he’s a little on the arrogant side - so Hatchet lures him into an elaborate con that sees the boys in the hole for half a million pounds with one week to pay it back.
All seems lost until Eddy overhears their neighbors planning a heist on a neighborhood drug dealer. Eddy and the boys decide to rob the robbers and acquire a set of weapons from a couple of small time hoods in order to make it happen. What they don’t realize as they set their plan in motion is that the weapons they purchased were stolen from The Hatchet, their neighbors might be on to them and Harry’s debt collector is hot on their heels. Eddy and his friends aren’t the brightest guys in London but luckily for them nobody else involved in this caper is, either. Through a complex comedy of errors, everything comes to a head at the movie’s climax and just when you think you know how it’s going to end, Lock, Stock leaves off on one of the more entertaining cliffhangers since The Italian Job.
As I said, Ritchie gets a lot of static for supposedly aping Tarantino but it isn’t entirely deserved. Lock, Stock has flaws to be sure but they’re mainly the result of an inexperienced writer/director who never really had much to say other than "Look at me! I’m here!" Lock, Stock is shrewd, stylish, well edited and imminently quotable. But most of the characters are indistinguishable from each other – Eddy and his pals are likeable but they’re all lifeless, sneering carbon copies. The antagonists are colorful and menacing but again, they’re almost interchangeable. The Hatchet, The Dog, The Baptist, Big Chris…you could swap just the names or the actors and roles themselves, and you’d still end up with pretty much the same movie. So much like a music video or a delicious bear claw, Lock, Stock is a filling, satisfying but ultimately pointless experience.
This is a movie with little meaning, less to say and very little to remember other than the fact that it was worth a good laugh. But at the time it was released, this movie was something of a breath of fresh air. London’s East End underworld constituted an exotic change of scenery for most moviegoers and despite their similarities Ritchie’s characters were a welcome variation on the standard Hollywood crime flick in style, if not substance. The movie’s slick editing, gritty, sepia urban look and retro soundtrack made for a satisfying presentation and more importantly, left little time for analysis. The more you think about things, the more the seams show and the less exciting your experience. But when it’s your birthday are you counting the calories or are you just enjoying the taste?
My advice with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is to just enjoy the taste. It’s your birthday and Guy Ritchie’s gift to you is a brisk ride that’s undeniably just a really fun way to spend an hour and a half. And if it doesn’t leave you with a smile on your face when it ends, then you should have known this probably wasn’t your cup of tea to begin with.
I suppose that if you’re a cynic, it’s easy to cast a judgment on this film with the benefit of hindsight. Ritchie’s follow up, Snatch, was a very similar film with a very similar tone and Revolver and Rock and Rolla make it easy to dismiss him as a one trick pony. But while Ritchie’s skill set seems to be somewhat narrow I think that when you look at Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in context it deserves its reputation as one of the breakout films of 1998. It single handedly revived the British gangster drama, launched the career of Jason Statham (which is good enough for me) and if you enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, take a look at this film if you want to see where the director cut his teeth. There’s nothing in Lock, Stock that’s any more frustrating than Pulp Fiction’s McGuffin or its mean spiritedness, so I wonder if those who insist on making direct comparisons do so for lack of anything else to say. Sometimes the people you inspire are more important than what you did to inspire them, and I think that in separate ways, Tarantino and Ritchie deserve credit for both.
So maybe there’s a third type of heist film – the “Guy Ritchie”. It’s the kind of film that repackages something that’s been done before but in a slightly different context. Call it“homage” if you like; call it a “rip off” if you’re a misanthrope. But in this case it’s fun, funny, and exciting – not because it’s entirely original but because you’d forgotten how entertaining it can be to see bad people do bad things to other bad people – in Britain.
In real life, most criminals aren’t particularly bright; this is why they stoop to petty theft instead of starting their own corporations, which is the smart way to steal. Maybe it makes us all feel a little safer to see a den of thieves stab each other in the back – we’re told that crime doesn’t pay but there’s nothing like seeing a maxim in action to convince you that it is true. Maybe Guy Ritchie is more than just the “British Tarantino”. The American version continues to make “Tarantino films”; they’re successful but they consistently appeal to a narrow base. Guy Ritchie has learned to take his vision mainstream and with it has earned mainstream success without making altogether terrible movies in the process. It seems that once again, he’s learned to take something that already exists and turn it something that’s just different enough to break the same mold twice.
As Tom would say, it’s all completely chicken soup. Good, good stuff.