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| Directed by Guy Ritchie; Starring Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Morna, Jason Stratham, Steven Mackintosh, Vinnie Jones, Sting, Lenny McLean, P.H. Moriarty, Steve Sweeney, Frank Harper, and Stephen Marcus |
If there was ever a film that I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did. Despite a small cult following, the travails of four British friends embroiled in debt did not interest me. It seemed like it was a good idea messed-up by a wide variety of bad ideas of how to use the camera. It was not even half as funny as Trainspotting.
Lock, Stock is about the owing of 500 thousand pounds and the attempts to make the payment. When one friend talks his chums into giving him 200 thousand pounds to play high-stakes cards with, he not only losses the money but picks up a debt to the main gangster in all of London. There is a wide array of characters that range from grunts to drug-dealers to gun collectors.
I will admit that those jokes in the film that were funny were really funny (the robbing of a gun collector’s house is the high point of the film). The performances seem to be on mark despite a few minor glitches. The story seems to work because of its unpredictability. In fact the only thing that I really disliked about the film was its direction. The camera shots seem to be the brain-child of some guy who loves (and do I mean loves) slow-motion and freeze-frame shots. If those two technical ways work for you, than you might enjoy the film, but your humble narrator hates those along with speeding up action (only exception seems to be A Clockwork Orange, which get pardoned for being the film that pretty much introduced it). I have a feeling that the director was hoping to be seen as some visionary in the vein of Kubrick but comes off much more like Alan Rudolph with Afterglow.
