Review : Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels : Written and Directed by 'Guy Ritchie' this film, is just brilliant. It really is. It's a film which shows the audience, the true talents of Guy Ritchie as he cleverly tells a story of not just one person, but of many alternate stories contain several characters, and how each of their alternate stories link into the main story. The plot of this film is just excellent - A fixed card game in London triggers four friends, thugs, weed-growers, hard gangsters, loan sharks and debt collectors to collide with each other in a series of unexpected events, all of which for the sake of some weed, cash and two value for money - antique shotguns.

 As you may already guess, I like the film a lot. I like films which are clever, and I like gangster movies which contain a lot of proper action and life threatening danger. It's also a comedy in strange ways, if you actually think about it, as you watch it the humour in this story, actually very much ties into and works in the story, and quite well to.

As well as it being a comedy, it concentrates more on being, a Crime thriller which is the film's main purpose.
The dialogue in this story, quite snappy and to the point, but that's another contributing factor about this film, the dialogue is so good that there are several famous lines from this, picked out and selected by viewers who love this film, just as much as I did.

The Storyline entails of Four Jack-the-lads who have their own separate talents, to form a team. They find themselves seriously heavily, in debt to an East End hard man and his enforcers after a fixed card game. Overhearing their neighbours in the next flat plotting to hold up a group of out-of-their-depth drug growers, our hero's decide to stitch up the robbers in turn. In a way the confusion really starts when a pair of antique double-barrelled shotguns go missing in a completely different scam. However, Guy Ritchie is so clever at tying in those stories together, so the film makes sense in the end. Not a very difficult film to follow, It's not like 'Pulp Fiction' where it's all over the place; To me the story is very clear as tow what happens in the story, and how it links into the affairs of other characters.

Here's a clip from Lock, Stock.

The music in this film (The Soundtrack) is really good, lots of interesting choices of songs coming in and out of this film, all of which work well in terms of setting the scene, adding dramatic emphasis and setting up the mood of scenes. Music wise, I don't see much of a problem with the songs - The Soundtrack, there were some songs, to which were not familiar to me, when I first watched it. Nowadays, I know every word to every song in this film, and have no problem with it at all.

Script wise, I really like the script. It's got an old fashioned hardness to it, which Guy Ritchie can do. It's got his talents written all of it. You can tell that is this a Ritchie movie. Ritchie creates fantastic characters and if you take the clip above, as I talk about the character of 'Rory Braker' for example - when antagonised and angry he really is a character of strong will and doesn't like to be screwed over by anyone one else lesser than he is - really great character development and character building.

Performance wise, Lock, Stock is very well cast. It's got people like : Jason Statham, Nick Moran, Steven Mackintosh, Vinnie Jones, Lenny McLean and Jason Flemyng all of which gives brilliant performances throughout, and each of their characters are different, they have different ideas and different understandings of the way the world works, so what you have is a great understanding of what people today are like now, though these characters are fictional, their relateable to our everyday sociaty, though this film was released back in 1998, It's still going strong today, and that's what I think makes this film so good.



The film itself, is a very well executed piece of which is so wonderfully shot and carefully directed. Guy Ritchie knows his stuff, and how he calls the shots, he's very perseverance in his camera angles, he can show off the domence of a situation and also show comedy moments as well, with light intention.

The film is a bit violent, but that's okay by me, I like action violence done well, and this was done well. No complaints from me on that side of the film.

Overall, nothing bad at all to say about this film, because you can't necessarily fault it, It's too good.

I'll give it a 9/10. One of the best films, I've seen.

Thank You for reading this review.

NEXT TIME : I will review 'Black Swan' which is another graphic drama; I'll post that review on Friday the 30th of August 2013.