Arriving in this country with the kind of transatlantic hype not seen since Trainspotting, the British Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels hits the shore with a resounding thud, its flashy style and modest cleverness far outweighed by its smarmy hipsterisms. The story of a quartet of ordinary Joes (or should that be ordinary Cecils?) whose desperate scramble to pay off a mob debt leads to run-ins with legions of London's less savory characters, Lock, Stock represents a hefty withdrawal from the Bank of Tarantino, its convoluted plot and blasé attitude towards violence mimicking the worst parts of Pulp Fiction. Loaded with actors beautiful and grotesque, exploding with gunfire every time things start slowing down, Lock, Stock is like a thief who dangles glittery baubles in front of your eyes while surreptitiously reaching for your wallet.

For a movie in which so little that's meant to surprise actually does, perhaps the least surprising thing about Lock, Stock is that director Guy Ritchie cut his teeth on commercials. It's certainly a pretty enough film, if you like burnished mahogany and men with visible abs, but Ritchie's constructing a campaign without a product to sell; imagine a beer commercial with no beer. The film is structured as a violent farce, in which our four heroes (Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, and Jason Statham) escape death only by the slimmest of coincidences, as the various factions on the trail collide with each other instead of their intended targets. A large sum of cash, several pounds of Olympic-quality marijuana, and a pair of antique dueling pistols also find their way into the mix, each chased by a different gang for a different reason.

If anything is on sale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, it's a lifestyle, one in which men are men and women are furniture, literally -one of the movie's few female characters is so lifeless she's confused with a sofa. What it offers is a chance to descend—temporarily, like our unlucky quartet—into the underworld, where men with names like Hatchet Harry and Barry the Baptist make their home. In essence, it's about four men discovering the danger and the exhilaration of a world where arguments are still settled with brute force, barely escaping with their lives but flush with the excitement of it all. (To bolster the audience's thrill, several supporting roles are filled by real ex-cons, with a bare-knuckle champ and a soccer star thrown in for good measure.) Despite their inexperience with matters criminal, it's not long before our heroes are talking like seasoned street toughs, offering up tidbits like, "Guns for show, knives for a pro." The idea seems to be that inside every modern man is a gangster waiting to get out.

Of course, gangsterism here is mainly a matter of style; our heroes may be seduced by the underworld's catchy lingo and suave style, but they don't actually turn into hardened killers. And it's that kind of bargain that Lock, Stock offers its audience: Learn How to Talk Like a Gangster in 12 Easy Steps, but don't worry about hanging out with men who murder for a living. Where a movie like Reservoir Dogs at least glancingly acknowledges that its fast-talking hoods are a gruesome bunch (cf. the ear-slicing scene), Lock, Stock's superficial gloss doesn't admit any such realities. Most of the film's copious violence occurs offscreen, so that we need only stare stunned at a pile of corpses, rather than witness the actual slaughter. At one point, the four are walking down the sidewalk, arms swinging Dogs-style, when a man comes bursting out of a bar with his head on fire. They barely blink, wait for him to pass, then walk into the bar.

It's hard to say exactly when sociopathy became hip, but the extension of irony to violent nihilism seems an inescapable fact of '90s pop culture. Even the adrenaline-pumping pseudofascism of an action blockbuster seems preferable to Lock, Stock's been-there-done-that acceptance that hey, sometimes people get set on fire. A movie like Face/Off, whose body count is probably triple that of Lock, Stock, at least solicits the audience's involvement, rather than encouraging them to disengage and chuckle at the characters' plights. It's easy enough to feel nothing and laugh at others' misfortunes; why you'd need a movie to encourage that is a mystery.

Join the
City Paper
Mailing List