Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

The term Tarantino-esque has faded a bit in American Independent filmmaking, as have the fortunes of its namesake. To judge by the debut film of British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, that style of moviemaking hasn't died but has found greener pastures overseas. This is an audacious, frenetic, ultimately pointless exercise in scams, double-crosses, whimsical violence, and arty human folly.

A get-rich-quick heist, as usual, is the cause of everything. Eddie (Nick Moran), Bacon (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), and Tom (Jason Statham), a hunky quartet of wanna-be high-rollers, plot to win big in a poker game with Hatchett Harry (P.H. Moriarty), a London mobster. The game is fixed, however, and the aspiring punks find themselves with a few days to repay a gambling debt of half a million pounds. Their solution is to rob their neighbors, a ruthless band of drug dealers. Their neighbors also have plans, however, as do Harry and an assortment of other crusty ne'er-do-wells; and each scheme collides with the others with the giddy logic of a nuclear chain reaction.

Ritchie orchestrates the plots and anti-plots with the delight of a sadistic child whose artistic palette brims with cinematic pyrotechnics and movie allusions. Sometimes his showoff style seems gratuitous. But the performances -- especially by fierce footballer Vinnie Jones and the late, real-life tough guy Lenny McLean as two of Hatchett Harry's henchmen -- give the frivolity the needed flesh and blood. By the end of Lock, Stock, Ritchie's career shows signs of smoking. At the Avon.
-- Peter Keough