BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST
Thursday, July 31, 2014
"Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" (1998)
Jason Flemyng, Jason Statham, Dexter Fletcher
Written and Directed by Guy Ritchie
Director Guy Ritchie dropped out of school in 1983 at the age of fifteen. He toiled as a bartender and a bricklayer for ten years until a director friend offered him a job as a runner, giving him an inroad into the industry. His 1995 20-minute short film Hard Case, a prequel to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, was his first piece of work produced that wasn't a commercial advertisement or music video. After rejection from ten British film distributors, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels was released in the UK in 1998. It would be the film debut of actor Jason Statham (Snatch, Transporter, Crank). My first experience with Guy Ritchie was the heated opening heist sequence of Snatch, in which a disguised Benecio Del Toro rips off a diamond wholesaler in spectacular fashion. Right then, I thought "Okay, Mr. Ritchie…You have my attention"
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is a triumphant work of humor, grit, and gunsmoke from start to finish. After a stretch of bad luck at a high-stakes card game, Eddy (Nick Moran) and his associates "Soap" (Dexter Fletcher), "Bacon" (Jason Statham), and Tom (Jason Flemyng) hatch a scheme to repay their £500,000 debt when they overhear their neighbors planning to rob a group of bohemian pacifist ganja dealers. The four develop a plan to rob the robbers. Meanwhile, two ne'er-do-well thugs have burgled a highly coveted pair of antique shotguns (a healthy McGuffin if I've ever seen one!), which they then sell--unaware of their true value--to a fence, who in turn resells them to Tom and his friends for £700, and the four use the guns in their daring robbery of cash and weed from the neighbors.
The story dances between the intersecting story lines of Eddy and his friends, their creditor: the self-styled Porn King/sex shop owner "Hatchet" Harry and his advisor Barry "The Baptist", the dealers, the robbing neighbors and a few other hangers-on, including stonefaced debt collector Big Chris (played by Vinnie Jones (Snatch, Gone in Sixty Seconds)) and his son and heir Little Chris. (Fun Fact: Vinnie Jones showed up to his first day of shooting after being released from police custody for beating up his neighbor)
The sets depict a dingy, weathered corner of London. Locations sport chipped paint and old furniture in what could've easily been scouted abandoned buildings. This gives the film a layer of grit that I feel complements the already pulpy story very nicely. Ritchie's work has a number of known idiosyncrasies that are apparent in Lock Stock, including the judicious application of a high-speed camera to show the rapid firing of a Bren light machine gun in glorious slow motion. The script is a beautifully messy mixture of Cockney rhyming slang and inventive british wit (admittedly about 5% of the dialogue was unintelligible to me, and I consider myself a commander of english language. there are even Cockney subtitles during one scene), and the direction (save for a select few choppy scenes here and there) is well-oiled. The soundtrack is (true to the Ritchie form) well chosen, with tracks from James Brown, Iggy and the Stooges, and the Stone Roses, to name a few.
I give Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels :
4.5 / 5 battered Traffic Wardens
Drugs and money change hands many times in the film.
An interesting aside: Before watching this movie for review, I caught about ten minutes of Full Metal Jacket while eating my lunch. During the scene I was watching, Joker (Matthew Modine) and Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) are being propositioned by a Vietnamese prostitute in the streets of Da Nang (I believe). Joker remarks to Rafterman that half of the prostitutes service the enemy soldiers and the other half have tuberculosis. He then advises Rafterman only to pick prostitutes who cough.Jump to later in the day when im about halfway through Lock, Stock. Eddy, Soap, Tom, and Bacon are driving in the car, and they take turns telling jokes. The scene is jumping between them and other groups of characters, but only a portion of each joke the men tell is heard, and Bacon remarks "So I f***ed the one that was coughing". Nevermind the fact that im almost certain that he and Joker from FMJ told the same joke (or a close analog, anyway), but the fact that I noticed them both for the first time, on the same day, within hours of each other, kinda blew my mind a little bit.