Movie Review: Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

A raucous multi-heist crime comedy, Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels throws everything at the screen. A lot of it sticks, but the film often threatens to disintegrate under its own weight.

In London, friends and small time criminals Eddy (Nick Moran), Tom (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher) and Bacon (Jason Statham) pool their money and plan to win big at an illegal poker game run by "Hatchet" Harry (P.H. Moriarty). Meanwhile, Harry instructs his chief henchman Barry "the Baptist" (Lenny McLean) to steal two precious rifles from a bankrupt estate. Big Chris (Vinnie Jones) also works for Harry as an uncompromising collections man, and he incongruously completes his assignments with his young son Little Chris.

Barry hires bumbling thieves Gary and Dean to pull off the rifle heist, and thanks to their incompetence the stolen rifles end up with Eddy's acquaintance Nick "the Greek" (Stephen Marcus), infuriating Harry.

The poker game goes badly for Eddy, and he is forced to come up with a lot of money in a hurry. An opportunity arises when he eavesdrops on his neighbours, hardened criminals led by Dog (Frank Harper) and planning a heist of a marijuana grow-op run by mellow potheads. Eddy and his friends plot to steal from Dog, an ill-advised move to begin with, but things get a lot worse when crime lord Rory Breaker (Vas Blackwood) turns out to be the main victim of the marijuana theft, and sets out to extract bloody revenge.

The directorial debut of Guy Ritchie, who also wrote the script, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is an enjoyable over-the-top thriller, filled with colourful characters, bizarre incidents, madcap stand-offs and cacophonous shoot-outs. The film is set in a twilight zone free from any law enforcement intervention, where everyone is a crook with varying degrees of violence propensity, and almost everyone is male.

Ritchie's criminals speak with heightened self-awareness, the dialogue a stream of witty put-downs peppered with cockneyisms, north versus south disparagement and never ending vulgarity. The action scenes combine a high bullet count with punctuations of humour. The cameras look away from the bloodiest carnage, Ritchie more interested in intricate set-ups and immediate aftermaths, or capturing in slow motion some of the weirder action on the edges of the main event.

But it all does get to be too much. Between Eddy's crew, Harry's shop, Dog's gang, the weed growers, the idiot thieves and Rory's operation, Ritchie crams six separate groups of guys into his movie. With a relatively economical running time of 106 minutes, narration is pressed into service to try and sort out who's who, the screen time is fragmented into narrative blurs, and no characters emerge as anchors. The film becomes a case of more is less, as there is only so much joy to be squeezed out of random guys threatening other random guys with painful exits.

Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is stylistically enjoyable, the film's elevated energy just about overcoming a case of too many crooks.

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Movie Review: Swordfish (2001)

Choose a random clutch of movie stars lacking in any chemistry, cast most of them in the wrong roles, mix in a limp and incomprehensible technobabble-heavy script, garnish with superfluous action sequences and over-the-top violence, sit back and cringe as the mess unfolds.

It is difficult to imagine how a film featuring John Travolta, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman and Don Cheadle (not to mention Vinnie Jones and Sam Shepard) could be botched so badly, but director Dominic Sena, in way over his head, embraces the incompetence with aplomb. Sena, whose normal pool depth is the shallow waters of music videos, disappeared from directing movies for eight years after Swordfish, presumably to allow memories to fade.

Gabriel Shear (Travolta) is some sort of mega-rich, ultra-shady and uber-cool manipulator, operating outside the law with wild abandon. Stanley Jobson (Jackman) is a down-and-out expert computer hacker just released from jail and desperate to regain custody of his daughter. Gabriel uses his mistress Ginger (Berry) to lure Stanley into accepting a $10 million assignment involving hacking into some government database to siphon off billions of somehow abandoned dollars. Agent Roberts (Cheadle), who threw Stanley in jail to begin with, is curious about what Gabriel is up to, while Ginger is revealed as a Drug Enforcement Agency agent. There is also a sinister Senator Reisman (Shepard) attempting to influence events using fake smiles and contrived dialogue.

After endless scenes of computer screens displaying nonsense, fingers tap-tap-tapping furiously at keyboards, manic car chases and midnight street shoot-outs, events climax in a ridiculous bank heist that is then topped-off by an even more farcical bus-dangling-from-a-helicopter fiasco.

Travolta tackles the role of Gabriel Shear with unbridled relish bordering on satanic intensity. Jackman sleepwalks through the movie in mock earnestness, while Berry's attempt at a sultry seductress falls flat, and never flatter than in her much touted topless scene.

The script by Skip Woods makes half-hearted attempts at explaining the hacking world, but quickly gives up and settles for images of what looks like a kid's plan for a simple Lego structure self-assembling on a black-and-green screen as a surrogate for Something Really Important going on. Swordfish equally makes an unconvincing attempt to provide Gabriel Shear with motivation for the carnage that he is causing by introducing yet another top-secret government anti-terrorism agency, and this just makes the story more ludicrous.

Compared to Swordfish, any James Bond movie would be elevated to a highly intellectual artistic masterpiece, and this falsely magnified appreciation of other films must remain as Swordfish's only achievement.

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