Guy Ritchie’s crime comedy earns its laughs through deadpan performances and carefully tangled schemes. The camera sometimes tries too hard, and the characters are thin, but the plotting makes this criminal company worth an evening.
Guy Ritchie gives his crooks so many competing schemes that keeping track of the other criminals becomes almost a full-time job. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a funny, well-built caper, worth an evening if criminal stupidity is your sort of entertainment. Its 105 minutes are crowded with people convinced they can outsmart somebody else. Ritchie enjoys testing that confidence. He is less interested in what any of these men might be like when there is nothing to gain.
Nick Moran’s Eddy, Jason Flemyng’s Tom, Dexter Fletcher’s Soap and Jason Statham’s Bacon give us a group worth following through the complications. Ritchie’s writing gives the ensemble a shared pleasure in blunt speech, and the actors understand how much comedy can sit in a pause. We laughed at Vinnie Jones’s Big Chris because he sounds so irritated at having to make himself clear. Jones does not need to compete with the film’s busy style; his blunt delivery is enough.
Ritchie the writer is good at keeping separate criminal schemes active without making each new group feel like a fresh start. Card sharks, drug dealers and antique shotguns could easily become a list of things to remember. Editor Niven Howie keeps the handovers brisk and allows the crooked dealings to accumulate, so the complication itself becomes funny. There are stretches when the plot takes more concentration than the people deserve, but the cutting usually makes the effort feel worthwhile.
Tim Maurice-Jones’s photography is more conspicuous, and not every visual flourish earns its place. The camera tricks can make a simple exchange feel as though it needs selling to us. Still, the exaggerated style fits a criminal world so cut off from ordinary life, and production designers Eve Mavrakis and Iain Andrews help keep that world coherent. The surroundings make the encounters between separate groups feel plausible despite the increasingly elaborate plotting. We never mistake any of it for an investigation into how the East End actually works.
David A. Hughes and John Murphy’s music contributes to the momentum, while the eclectic soundtrack encourages the film’s pleasure in its own bad behaviour. Music and cutting share the comic timing, allowing danger and absurdity to sit together without a laborious change of mood. The swagger is enjoyable, even when it draws more attention than the people underneath it. Ritchie knows how to keep a scene lively, though there are times when we would welcome a little less encouragement to admire the performance.
The more persistent weakness is Ritchie’s limited curiosity about his characters. The macho posturing can be funny, but repetition makes too many of the men seem alike, and violence occasionally substitutes for a joke. A gangster comedy need not explain society, but it benefits from giving us somebody whose predicament matters beyond the next clever connection. Here the actors provide most of that interest, which is enough to make the complications entertaining without making the nastiness entirely comfortable. Choose it for the deadpan company and the busy plotting, provided a shortage of sympathetic people will not spoil the evening.
