English director, producer, and screenwriter Guy Ritchie put himself back on the filmmaking map when he came out with his adaptation of Sherlock. Robert Downey Jr. was cast in the classic role of Sherlock Holmes, and the film’s positive reception inspired a slew of sequels, including one set to be released in 2022. However, before Sherlock, Ritchie actually was better known for his British gangster movies; his feature film debut, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels was a black comedy crime movie. Outside of a high-profile marriage to singer Madonna, these crime movies form the basis of what will be his legacy in the movie world.
In recent years, Disney also turned to his talents to direct the live adaptation of Aladdin. After recently signing with WME, per Variety, Ritchie will be returning sometime in the near future with an untitled action and thriller project, but, until then, fans can savor his previous content: a filmography that includes quite a few gangster movies. These are his best gangster movies, ranked.
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6 Revolver
Europacorp
2005’s Revolver made have had bad press among the critics and may not have performed well at the box office, but it managed to capture the hearts of fans to attain cult status. The movie was heavily based on the methodologies of Kabbalah, a branch of thought in Jewish mysticism. A gangster finds himself released from prison after seven years, and when he and his brother turn up at a gangster’s casino, believing that he owes something to them, chaos breaks out. When he discovers a method to trick anyone in any game or scenario, it increases his odds of achieving the revenge he seeks against those who have wronged him.
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5 RocknRolla
Dark Castle Entertainment
RocknRolla featured an all-star cast including Gerard Butler, Idris Elba, and Tom Wilkinson, among several other well-known actors. A mob boss who controls almost all of London’s real estate business (Wilkinson) finds himself at odds with a Russian billionaire seeking a specific land deal. For 7 million Euros, the billionaire agrees to bribe the local council for a piece of that land, but he is double-crossed, and a group known as the Wild Bunch steals all the money. Almost a copy-paste of several of Ritchie’s other films, including a cockney protagonist, RocknRolla is formulaic but still entertaining.
4 The Gentlemen
Miramax
The Gentlemen was Guy Ritchie’s first foray back into the world of gangs after a brief hiatus on that kind of storytelling — his last gangster film before this was RocknRolla, released 11 years prior. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, and Colin Farrell, the story begins when a magazine editor hires a private investigator to sniff out some details on a big name in the cannabis world and his connections to England’s elite. Once a promising young American student on a Rhodes Scholarship, Pearson’s origins seem humble, but then his story slowly becomes darker the deeper he gets into the industry. It only gets weirder from there. The Gentlemen does not do much to distinguish itself from Ritchie’s previous work, proving itself to his core fanbase.
3 Wrath of Man
MGM
Wrath of Man is Guy Ritchie’s most recent film, as it was released in 2021. A crime thriller, its story is splintered into four different parts to show how one catalyst led to all of these events occurring. In one storyline, an armored truck is mugged, and a man named Patrick (Jason Statham) applies for a job at a security company. When he is forced to confront the robbers himself, something peculiar happens, leading the viewers down a spiral, winding path twisting and turning on what is the truth and what happened here.
2 Snatch
Screen Gems
Snatch was Ritchie’s second feature film and was released in 2000. The movie shared many similarities to his previous movie — Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels — and even shared many of the same actors from the first movie. Many of Ritchie’s prominent themes and characters appear in Snatch as well. After an 86-carat diamond is snatched in Belgium, the thief tries to figure out the best price to pawn it for in London. The dealer lets the man’s brother know and suggests he should steal it, setting off a particular series of events. At the same time, the subplot consists of boxing and gangsters running rings.
1 Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
Nothing truly beats the original. For much of Ritchie’s filmography, he has been riffing on the same concepts established in his first movie, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Three old friends pool together 100,000 Euros so that they can try to win a high-stakes card game, but, as it turns out, it was rigged, and the three friends end up 500,000 Euros in debt. Told they have to pay it off within a week, times become desperate, and they hire thieves to steal from a local lord. As always, things do not go as planned, leading this plot astray in the wildest ways possible.
