Grouch's Full Review: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Put "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" into the VCR, then sit back on your couch and fasten your seatbelt. This is one wild ride at the movies.
At times reminiscent of "Trainspotting" and Tony Scott films ("True Romance" and "Enemy of the State" with competing gangs simultaneously drawing guns on each other), this British Tarantino wannabe starts off fast and never lets up.
Here’s the plot, as best I can describe it:
Tom, a young cardsharp and his three friends get in over their heads during a high-stakes game with a London gangster, Hatchet Harry the Porn King. Tom, owing Harry £500,000, faces losing his fingers one at a time if he doesn't pay within a week. Tom and his bumbling buddies discuss various ways to erase the debt (including beating Harry to death with one of his sex toys), all the while growing more desperate by the hour. One day, they overhear the neighbors in the flat next door who, it turns out, are a gang of thieves. Lo and behold, this set of gangsters is planning to raid a clandestine pot-growing operation. Meanwhile, Harry has dispatched a separate pair of burglars to recover a pair of antique guns in payment for a different debt. Then there’s the henchman who is also a loving father—-one minute he’s smashing a victim’s head in the door of a car, the next he’s gently reminding his son to buckle his seatbelt.
Buckle up indeed.
Writer-director Guy Ritchie launches such an assault of non-stop British slang (some of it so thick it needs subtitles a la "Trainspotting") and a barrage of characters, especially in the first few minutes, that you might find yourself punching the pause and rewind buttons every so often just to keep up. But if you hang in there for at least thirty minutes, plot and subplot will start to intertwine and you’ll understand the importance of a man on fire stumbling out of a pub or the significance of a girl who blends into the furniture when she sleeps.
Like its cinematic cousin "Trainspotting," "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" is full of stylish camera angles, stop-and-go motion and rapid-fire editing. At times, style threatens to overwhelm substance. After one too many slo-mo gun battles, I found myself thinking, "This movie is just a little too clever, a little too full of itself." But I’m a sucker for irony and this one is chock full of it—-especially in the last fifteen minutes. There are so many plot twists, you may need to see a chiropractor the next morning.
Now, if I can just get this seatbelt unfastened, I can hit the rewind button to see the whole thing again…
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