A brutally comic tale about a group of London friends who find themselves deep in debt to an East End tough, LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS is quick-paced, stylized, and highly entertaining. In his debut feature film, director-writer Guy Ritchie weaves a tangled web of shady, blithely eccentric characters and several .. Read more
| Starring | Vinnie Jones, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, Jason Statham |
|---|---|
| Director | Guy Ritchie |
| Genres | Comedy, Thriller |
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A brutally comic tale about a group of London friends who find themselves deep in debt to an East End tough, LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS is quick-paced, stylized, and highly entertaining. In his debut feature film, director-writer Guy Ritchie weaves a tangled web of shady, blithely eccentric characters and several storylines, all of them coming together in a gleeful explosion of murder and mayhem. When streetwise charmer Eddy (Nick Moran), the son of steely bar owner JD (Sting), botches a gambling scheme with his dad's nemesis, porn king Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty), he's got one week to come up with 500,000 pounds or he loses his fingers--and so do his friends Tom (Jason Flemyng), Bacon (Jason Statham), and Soap (Dexter Fletcher). While the pals scheme to make the money, Harry indulges his penchant for valuable antique shot guns, stolen for him by a couple of inept burglars. Soon the missing guns, a paranoid group of marajuana growers, a mean-spirited debt collector (Vinnie Jones) and his young son, and a violent bunch of thugs, are all thrown together in this tightly-woven, genuinely funny story that takes its inspiration from old British comic gangster flicks like THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN and more recent films like RESERVOIR DOGS and THE USUAL SUSPECTS.
| Starring | Vinnie Jones, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Steven Mackintosh, Sting, Jason Flemyng |
|---|---|
| Director | Guy Ritchie |
| Studio | UNIVERSAL PICTURES UK |
| Run time | DVD: 1 hr 47 mins Blu-ray: 1 hr 54 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Comedy, Thriller |
| Language | DVD: English Blu-ray: English |
| Hearing-impaired | English |
| Subtitles | Blu-ray: Dutch, Spanish, French, Spanish Latin American, German, English, French Canadian |
| Released | DVD: 02 Nov 2004 Blu-ray: unknown Production year: 1998 |
| Format | DVD |
Or you can rent each disc individually:
Widely regarded as the best British crime movie since The Long Good Friday, the youthful exuberance of Guy Ritchie's debut feature is truly infectious. The superb cast is spiced up with the presence of celebrities such as Sting, and especially Vinnie Jones in a well-received henchman-with-a-heart role. The action revolves around young cardsharp Eddy (Nick Moran), who loses ?500,000 he doesn't have to crime king Hatchet Harry. With a week to come up with the shortfall, he and mates Dexter Fletcher, Jason Flemyng and Jason Statham plan to hijack the proceeds of a robbery hatched by their gangster neighbours, but things go horribly wrong very quickly. Cheerfully amoral and featuring some canny carnage, it's fun from start to finish.
"...Brash, ebullient direction....The punchy little flourishes that load this English gangster film with attitude are perfectly welcome....A fine feat of macho gamesmanship..."
- If you think that a commercial-shooting director shouldn't attempt the big screen...
- If you enjoyed Tarantino's work, 'Fargo', 'Trainspotting', 'Fight Club', 'Snatch' or 'Memento'...
- If you want a taste of rhiming cockney...
...you must definitely watch this film.
Just a warning, it's definitely not for the narrow-minded...
A true oddity... don't miss it!
Guy Ritchie has a skill: the skill to take multi-layered gangster plots, weave them together, and come out with a fabric of the finest quality. As far as I'm concerned, if Ritchie can maintain this level of creativity, he can keep on making these films until the end of time. His characters are so well scripted and the actors so well chosen, there is a three-dimensional quality to this film, as if you can almost taste the sulphur in the shotgun blasts.
To describe the plot is difficult, unless we choose one character as the hero and the rest as the anti-heroes... but that's also diffcult. While certain people seem to be on our side, they're all equally involved in the plot. Twenty-somethings playing poker, a porn king who cheats at cards, Big Chris the hired thug, the stereotyped black ganja dealer, the northern monkeys, Barry the Baptist... all great characters.
Another aspect of Ritchie's films is that instead of good vs. evil, he offers us bad versus evil. All the characters do bad things: steal, drink, smoke dope and kill if necessary. But some are simply 'bad' (people who would be morally upright in a different setting) and others are 'evil' (no moral code at all, black all the way to the core of their heart). This almost non-dichotomy is probably not unique to Ritchie, but is something he excels in.
This Sporting Life: What Happens When Sports Heroes Act Up? Eric Cantona and Ken Loach. These are not names you would immediately put together. One is a multi-millionaire (surely?) ex footballer, revered by millons of fans; and French. The other is a proud socialist from middle-England (Nuneaton), who has rejected the big money offers; his films are admired but by a relatively small number of committed film buffs. What's more, Ken Loach is a dedicated supporter of Bath FC. I'm guessing there... Read more