Yet rather than work as a turn-off, Ritchie's showmanship--half macho braggadocio, half emotion-tinged bravura--slaps and tickles the viewer into submission. He takes a group of not-so-goodfellas, whose idea of fun is setting farts afire, and, against all odds, makes them lively and engaging.
Eddie the cardsharp (Nick Moran), Soap the chef (Dexter Fletcher), Bacon the smalltime scam artist (Jason Statham) and Tom the hustler of stolen goods (Jason Flemyng) are men in their late 20s who carry on like hapless, hopeful teenagers. Getting to know them is akin to sorting out bunkmates. What makes you warm to the bunch is their guttural bonhomie. They're never more vivid than when they're pooling their feelings--their foolish elation at a job medium-well-done, or their primal hatred of parking cops.
Eddie is a handsome fellow hiding anxiety behind a poker face, Soap a scowler who keeps his hands clean, Bacon a self-styled hard guy, and Tom a fast talker with ideas too big for his muscles or his brain. Ritchie fixes them in our minds and sets them in motion without making us feel that we know everything about them. Suddenly, Tom will blurt out a confidence scheme to fleece the sexually kinky, or Soap will unveil fearsome cutlery and proclaim, "Guns for show, knives for a pro." The flourishes fill out instead of contradict their personalities. In its own frivolous way, the movie demonstrates just how confusing overgrown kids can get because they haven't settled on an understanding of themselves.
Not that this film shows anybody growing up. With childish optimism and teenish desperation, these young men are counting on Eddie to make them rich with a big win at a high-stakes card game. They've put nearly everything else on hold, including, apparently, any relationships with women. So I was relieved to discover, courtesy of reporter Matt Wolf in the February 14 New York Times, that Eddie did have a girlfriend in an early cut, and, more important, that the guys' cheerful state of psychological arrest is the whole point of the movie.
In the film's home country (where it's been a giant hit), these four unassuming blokes have been taken up as the avatars of "laddism": according to Wolf, "rowdy, boys-will-be-boys behavior" rooted in the male proletariat yet now "fashionable and hip." It sounds like a dubious movement. Its products include the British and American versions of the sitcom Men Behaving Badly; I presume that it's helped fuel the retro-sexist trend to turn the cover of every Anglo or American men's mag into a Baywatch poster. Still, from the evidence of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, "laddism" has its charms as a revolt against hypocrisy and a cry for spontaneity.
Women as well as men may find these antiheroes refreshing, since they don't pretend to have any raised consciousness. They're blissfully unselfconscious--often, simply, unconscious.
The movie works because Ritchie puts his razzle-dazzle technique at the service of his quartet's unpredictable impulses. He uses a jester's tricks to spin a labyrinthine yarn. Part of the yarn's joke is just how much of it there is--and how many shady characters are entwined in it.
Any skilled auteur can involve an audience in medias res; Ritchie gets us involved in multimedias res. At a card table, Eddie has the killer knack for reading his opponents' hands in their faces. He persuades Bacon, Tom and Soap to help him raise the 100,000 pounds he needs to play at the table of porn operator and all-around racketeer Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty), whose nickname comes not from his face, but from his favorite weapon. Naive Eddie, not realizing that H.H. has the game wired, winds up 500,000 pounds in debt. He and his pals have a week to pay up before Harry's enforcers--Barry the Baptist (Lenny McLean), who drowns debtors, and Big Chris (Vinnie Jones), who muscles them--begin slicing off their digits.
The solution is more complicated than the setup: It involves a rabid thief named Dog (Frank Harper) and his sidekick, Plank (Steve Sweeney); a profitable ganja garden; two antique rifles Hatchet Harry craves for his collection; a couple of slapstick thieves-for-hire from up north who can't tell an antique from an aardvark; and an enigma in an Afro named Rory Breaker (Vas Blackwood) who seems spacey until you hear him tell an associate, "If you hold back anything, I'll kill ya. If you bend the truth, or I think you're bending the truth, I'll kill ya. If you forget anything, I'll kill ya. In fact, you're going to have to work very hard to stay alive."
The resulting herky-jerky motion gives off a humorous buzz. The four main lads are deadbeats, not Beatles, but Ritchie treats them as if they were the stars of A Hard Day's Night and Help!--and his own style owes more to the fearlessly eclectic Richard Lester than it does to Tarantino or Scorsese. The use of reggae, ska and retro-rock helps him establish an elastic rhythm. When Ritchie slows down the action, it's usually not to make a visual point, but to let his words sink in. He changes film speeds and angles so rapidly and promiscuously that when Eddie practices a one-handed shuffle, you feel certain that his hand has been sped up and the rest of the picture frozen.
Nothing Ritchie does is particularly original or profound, but he's got a back-alley flair that's both kinetic and literary. As a writer of dialogue, he knows how to build a rococo shtick into a relentless farcical eruption. Here's Tom trying to sell his competitor and sometime ally Nick the Greek (Stephen Marcus) some hot electronics: "That is 900 nicker in any shop you're lucky enough to find one in, and you're complaining about 200. What school of finance did you study? It's a deal, it's a steal, it's sale of the fucking century. In fact, fuck ya, Nick, I think I'll keep it." When Nick flashes an enormous wad, Tom explodes: "You could choke a dozen donkeys on that, and you're arguing about 100 pound? What do you do when you're not buying stereos, Nick--financing revolutions? . . . You got Liberia's deficit in your skyrocket. Tighter than a duck's butt you are. Now come on, let me feel the fiber of your fabric."
But Ritchie also knows how cleansing and uproarious a simple irony can be. Big Chris summarizes the entire chronicle of crackpot carnage when he says, "One more thing. It's been emotional."
You may not get a clear sense of the East End amid the phantasmagoria of old-fashioned sleaze and souped-up weed, of sex toys used as clubs and rifles as bargaining chips. (Apart from Nick's Greekness, the only reference to ethnicity comes when Tom says a deal is "as kosher as Christmas," and Nick must explain, "Jews don't celebrate Christmas.") You may not always know how the various mugs wind up in the exact right or wrong spots. Yet you always take amusement in Ritchie's flesh-and-blood versions of cartoon characters. The green public school kids who run the ganja garden are voluptuously silly, and Ritchie has the sense to give the zonked-out girl who lives with them a hilarious, unexpected climax.
This writer-director may or may not be a budding movie artist, but he's definitely a topnotch gamesman. In Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie tosses out inflammatory gags with blithe impunity. He plays pick-up sticks with dynamite.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Directed by Guy Ritchie.
Rated
