Parenthood is full of double standards. As kids, the irreversible binomial “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me” is an utterance instilled in us repeatedly throughout our formative years. The phrase is the architect of the beginnings of our defensive foundation, employed to fortify our susceptibility to verbal insult. The parental aversion to swearing contradicts this piece of advice, and speaks to the oxymoronic nature of those that deploy it. The occasional F-bomb from a kid pales in comparison to the iniquities of their parents and the problems of the world.
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Big Chris (Vinnie Jones) has a fundamental antipathy to his young son’s effing-and-jeffing in the Guy Ritchie classic Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Meanwhile, Big Chris simultaneously exposes him to the cruel world of debt collecting for an infamous London gangster. This is an exact example of the hilarious irony of those aforementioned double standards on which the English gangland cult-classic is so faultlessly constructed. As the film turns 25 this year, it’s indisputably, Ritchie’s best film to date, and its foul-mouthed, non-parental-consent script is an outrageous ode to the Kray-Esque East London criminal underworld.
Watching the Wild World of Lock Stock
Gramercy Pictures
In true Ritchie fashion, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels boots into play with a cockney narration from Alan Ford, who offers an introduction into the lives of two minor crooks. Bacon (a young Jason Statham) and Eddy (Nick Moran) are fleeing law enforcement after being caught selling knock-offs. Following the pair and their two friends, Will (Jason Flemyng) and Soap (Dexter Fletcher), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels chronicles the group’s unfortunate dealings with Hatchet Harry (Patrick Moriarty) after a rigged poker game gone-wrong.
The foursome now owes the impatient and unrelenting Harry and his ferocious heavies, Barry “The Baptist” (Lenny McLean) and Big Chris half a million pounds. Given just a week to front the cash, the group resort to drastic measures to pay off their collective debt. After days of deliberation, the men plan to kid the kidders by hijacking a neighbor’s drugs and money heist from a miscellaneous assembly of ex-public school, weed-selling (and smoking) toffs. The feature is like a six-way roundabout, with all the money-chasing men going after the same lot of cash, inextricably linked unbeknownst to them all.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: The Anti-Gangster Movie
A film filled to the brim with diamond geezers, cockney rhyming slang, and non-stop laddish, Micky-taking banter, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was Guy Ritchie’s chosen vehicle into the film industry. It was a Vauxhall Corsa of a ride, with its pimped-out rims, tinted windows, and a blaring guitar-riffed soundtrack bellowing from its speakers, announcing Ritchie as a major cinematic presence.
Ritchie’s 1998 film is a convoluted caper, with as many crossed wires as a 1940s telephone switchboard, yet for all of its apparent narrative complexity, the seamlessness of its execution makes it a simplistic follow. Despite all of its guns, knives, wheeler-dealers, and threats of finger mutilation, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is almost an anti-gangster movie. The real “gangsters” who embody every sense of the dirty word are, ultimately, the film’s greatest losers.
Harry “The Hatchet” (Patrick Moriarty) is a feared East London kingpin, respected through notoriety, his conniving exploits coming back to bite him. Aside from Big Chris, who’s merely an employee of Harry, all the antagonistic, nasty, unforgiving real criminal minds in the flick are one way or another shown the stage door, whether that be by being unceremoniously gunned down, hacked apart by a machete, or having their heads repeatedly caved in by a car door.
It is the “not so bad” guys that are spared from this lawbreaking bloodbath, the ones that find themselves inadvertently caught up in the crossfire by naively mixing with a killer crowd. While there are technically just two financial winners, the sense of justice that prevails is the film’s actual victor.
The Jovial, Highly Watchable Violence of Guy Ritchie
A common theme in Ritchie’s films, from Snatch and RocknRolla to Revolver and The Gentlemen, is violence, and its seriousness or lack thereof. These are movies that are all ultra-violent, yet through various comedic techniques and clever editing, they are never barbaric or scarring. The low-budget action never detours or deviates from its jovial tone, and while the very real threat of death continuously follows protagonists Bacon, Soap, Eddy, and Tom in their every tentative (or not so) move, the film always stays true to its convivial mood. Despite this, it never loses credibility or becomes some slapstick parody, neither teetering on the brink nor falling into the bracket of just another Goodfellas wannabe.
Both Snatch and 2019’s The Gentlemen put up a(very literal) good fight, but Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is Ritchie’s masterclass in how to make violence entertaining in a non-exploitive way. Al its bravado, dry-wit, and cockney-gunslinger-action make Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels the gem in Ritchie’s directorial crown, and it will take one monumental filmmaking effort to knock it off its perch.
