Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
A card shark and his unwillingly-enlisted friends need to make a lot of cash quick after losing a sketchy poker match. To do this they decide to pull a heist on a small-time gang who happen to be operating out of the flat next door.
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9 films that influenced this film
What critics say influenced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
One can also readily assume that Trainspotting figured into the mix (several scenes and photographic tricks are lifted almost verbatim), and the combination of humor and bloodshed recalls Elmore Leonard's approach (see, in particular, Out of Sight).
A dark comic crime thriller from talented newcomer Guy Ritchie, the movie could be the bastard child of "Pulp Fiction" and "Trainspotting," though it's definitely too original and entertaining to be merely an homage to either.
A giddy compendium of every hipster noir cliche of the past 10 years, Guy Ritchie's "Trainspotting"-meets-"Reservoir Dogs" caper comedy proves that anyone who believes young filmmakers have outgrown the cycle of slapstick violence initiated by the rise of Quentin Tarantino back in 1992 has another think coming.
With a plot as convoluted as the East-Ender accents that pepper the production (as in Trainspotting, subtitles are sporadically necessary here), Ritchie and a spot-on cast of mostly newcomers steamroll through the proceedings at a cool 210 kilometers per second.
Attempting to marry Oliver Twist with Trainspotting, this ends up more like a bloody episode of TV's Minder.
Writer/director Guy Ritchie has slammed one out of the park with a film that should have all the impact of "Trainspotting".
A dark comic crime thriller from talented newcomer Guy Ritchie, the movie could be the bastard child of "Pulp Fiction" and "Trainspotting," though it's definitely too original and entertaining to be merely an homage to either.
The pub is named Samoa Joe's, which seems like a sideways nod to "Pulp Fiction'' (Big Kahuna burgers crossed with Jack Rabbit Slim's restaurant).
"Reservoir Dogs" revolves around classical gangster themes of loyalty and betrayal; "Pulp Fiction" hinged on Sam Jackson's choice to give up violence for redemption; and "Jackie Brown," which had the courage to cast relatively unknown middle-aged actors in its central roles, was all about missed opportunities and second chances.
At the time, it looked as if Guy Ritchie were yet another opportunist cashing in on the Quentin Tarantino fever of the 1990s (and indeed, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were even more popular in Ritchie's home of England than they were in America).
It's a first-feature by its writer-director, Guy Ritchie, its style cloned largely from black-humor hoodlum genre works like "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction."
His debut feature, " Reservoir Dogs ," was an even bigger inspiration for independent filmmakers when it hit Sundance in 1992, and undeniably so to Ritchie's own debut, "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."
At the time, it looked as if Guy Ritchie were yet another opportunist cashing in on the Quentin Tarantino fever of the 1990s (and indeed, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were even more popular in Ritchie's home of England than they were in America).
A giddy compendium of every hipster noir cliche of the past 10 years, Guy Ritchie's "Trainspotting"-meets-"Reservoir Dogs" caper comedy proves that anyone who believes young filmmakers have outgrown the cycle of slapstick violence initiated by the rise of Quentin Tarantino back in 1992 has another think coming.
It's a first-feature by its writer-director, Guy Ritchie, its style cloned largely from black-humor hoodlum genre works like "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction."
Although he nicks a bit from Trainspotting and Reservoir Dogs, first-time writer-director Ritchie has a canny and captivating style.
Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs'' had characters with mileage on them, played by veterans like Harvey Keitel , Lawrence Tierney and Michael Madsen .
Lurking beneath all the other sources, I suspect, is "Night and the City'' (1950), Jules Dassin's masterful noir, also about crime in the East End, also with a crime kingpin who employs a giant bruiser.
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Writer-director Guy Ritchie piles it on: they're naff, spoiled boys who find themselves in the Cockney gangland of "The Long Good Friday," getting in a bind over an 500,000 gambling debt, sliding into a rip-off involving pot dealers and debt collectors and self-proclaimed "porn kings," and finding the kind of old-line, hard-ass muscle against them.
In one corner, ''The Long Good Friday'' and a British cinematic tradition of hoods and skanks whose identities and accents are not, at first, readily tracked by American audiences.
The director, Guy Ritchie , says his greatest inspiration was "The Long Good Friday'' (1980), the Cockney crime movie that made a star out of Bob Hoskins .
Instead, he cites his primary inspiration as the taut, brilliant 1980 British gangster film, The Long Good Friday.
That aside, The Long Good Friday is still a sizzler, and clearly the precursor for later entries like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
No heroes presented and no story to speak of are the main attributes for this futile attempt at a Trainspotting, Performance, The long Good Friday, and a Tarantino-like gangster/comedy, all rolled into one film.
"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' is the kind of movie where you naturally play Spot the Influence: Tarantino, of course, and a dash of Hong Kong action pictures, and the old British crime comedies like "The Lavender Hill Mob.''
There is a collection man, Big Chris (Vinnie Jones of "Gone in 60 Seconds"), his boss, Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty) and the drug dealers they ripped off.
The closest the country had previously come to producing something similar was way back when Danny Boyle first burst on the screen with 1994’s Shallow Grave, and even that was more Hitchcock than post-modern histrionics.
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"Reservoir Dogs" revolves around classical gangster themes of loyalty and betrayal; "Pulp Fiction" hinged on Sam Jackson's choice to give up violence for redemption; and "Jackie Brown," which had the courage to cast relatively unknown middle-aged actors in its central roles, was all about missed opportunities and second chances.