Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

A crime comedy set in London. Four friends put money together. Eddie is good at cards and sits down at a table with a hundred thousand pounds. The game is rigged. Eddie gets up owing five hundred thousand and has a week. From there the film is made of lines colliding. Next door a group is planning to rob a drug house; the four friends decide to rob them. Other groups are in play at the same time. Two thieves are selling a pair of antique shotguns, a debt collector is about, and a father and son are running their own account. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but a chain: every group in the film is after another and nobody quite knows what is happening. The two shotguns circulate at the centre of the narrative and turn up at the end somewhere nobody expected. The telling is fast. Narration, freeze frames, short introductions and heavy London slang; some sections need subtitles. The film closes on a telephone that is not answered. It was made on a very small budget, largely with money raised from acquaintances; some of the cast were not professionals and one was a former footballer. It was the director's first feature and is taken as the production that started the wave of British crime comedy in the late 1990s. Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones and Sting are in the cast. Guy Ritchie wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes fast-cut, tangled crime comedy. Who it is not for: anyone looking for character depth; the narrative is crowded and nobody is introduced.