Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Well, since I can't seem to shut up about British stuff at the moment, here's a few thoughts on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I just rewatched on Netflix last night.

The first thing to say is that I'm not 100% sure it holds up. This is not to say it's a bad movie or anything, but it looks and sounds really raw, and the line readings and acting aren't always as great as they could be. Part of this is because a lot of the characters are played by non-actors - for a couple of them it was their first time in a movie, and others were definitely at the beginning of their careers.

Guy Ritchie also tries to be a little too clever sometimes with his cinematography. The spot where it really works is the start of the movie, where Eddy loses the card game and kicks off the chain of events that make up the plot. The camera focuses tight on his face, following him as he walks out and blurring or doubling shots of him to give that impression of drunken what-the-fuckness that I can relate to.

Not that I've ever lost £500,000 to East End gangsters in an underground poker game, but Ritchie does a good job of capturing that body-blow type of feeling.

He's a little less successful in a few other spots, like when they're celebrating having pulled off their heist, or when Big Chris (as played by Vinnie Jones) is beating Dog to death with a car door for having threatened his son. In the first case, it looks too staged, while in the second it's kind of obvious - of course Big Chris is enraged at his son being endangered, so I wonder if shooting that more matter-of-factly would have worked better than slow-motion.

Though it should be noted that I was super impressed with that scene when I was seventeen.

But about that there Vinnie Jones: was there ever a role better suited to a human being than that? Maybe I say it because I don't know Jones as a footballer, and because this film was the first I ever saw of him. But with twenty years of seeing Jones in other roles, and learning more about British gangster films, I have to appreciate how well he inhabits the role - after all, there's not many footballers I'd believe in the role of an East End enforcer.

Casting is uniformly pretty good in the movie, at least in terms of how the actors look. The main characters all look like petty criminal losers, the weed growers look like a bunch of middle-class stoners out of their element (I'm always a bit surprised to remember that Winston is not, in fact, played by Blur singer Damon Albarn, but he could have been), and the real criminals all look like real criminals.

As I said, sometimes the line readings aren't great, which might be because the actors aren't great at line readings, or because the lines aren't easy to read in the first place. But very little of it takes you out of the movie.

Two other casting choices I want to single out. First is Sting, as JD, Eddy's father. I always forget he's in this movie, and I have to say that for a tantric-sex-having, lute-playing former punk rocker he's actually fairly believable as a bar owner and basically the one honest man who's not affected by the shenanigans going on around him. The scene where Vinnie Jones comes to tell him he's going to have to give up the bar in a week, and Sting tells him to tell his boss to go fuck himself, is really fun and the two actors play off against each other really well.

The other one is Jason Statham, who like Vinnie Jones used this movie to launch his movie career. But where Jones has played essentially the same character for the past twenty years, Statham starts out here as a very different character from what he plays in the Transporter or the Fast & Furious movies. Actually, the first scene, where he's shilling stolen goods in an alley in London and giving it the wideboy patter (to use the Brits' own term of art) makes him pop like a firecracker. You can believe him in the role, even knowing what a badass he gets typecast as all these years later. Go rewatch that scene and enjoy an actor reveling in a role.

What else is there? The music, of course, though perhaps the most memorable thing is the use of Ocean Colour Scene's "100 Mile High City". Britpop was kind of over by then, but the movie still manages to catch that zeitgeist in a way that feels right. Most impressive to me was the use of "Fools Gold" by the Stone Roses as the end of the plot unfolds, with all the bad guys dead and the heroes walking away with whatever riches they've found. I love the song, and it's a nice revelation to see it crop up here.

So yeah, flawed movie and all, rough around the edges with the acting and scripting and cinematography, but you can't deny that the movie's fun and eye-catching and well-cast. Despite the presence of Jones and Statham, who went on to big success in Hollywood, it's not chock-full of other British actors that you recognize, so that you can just go on enjoying the movie without going, "What? John Simm, Doctor Who's the Master, as New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner?" To pull out an example at complete random.

Lock, Stock and its successor Snatch are the only two Guy Ritchie films I've seen. I don't know if I'm feeling the lack, but taken together they're a fun indicator of what British gangster movies were doing back then. They also got copied by a bunch of other movies, which also shows how people responded to them. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is where it started, and it's a nice way to spend a couple of hours - so go check it out on Netflix asap.