There are no women, and there are no cops there are just hoods engaged in one-upping each other, climbing an invisible ladder. Criminals are constantly and unknowingly trying to pay debts with money they stole from the men they’re trying to pay.
Ritchie’s version of crime in England is a fantasy, filled with double-crosses, coincidences, accidents, and tricks of fate.
Make no mistake: These are not realistic movies.
The locales are kaleidoscopic: gypsy campgrounds, underground boxing venues, pawn shops. It takes place in weirdly empty British towns where gangsters run rampant. Snatch, made with more money and bigger stars, trades the overfried look of Lock, Stock for a more traditional palette. Snatch basically has the same plot: just replace “drug heist” with “diamond heist,” “two shotguns” with “bare-knuckle boxing,” and you’re sitting pretty. Lock, Stock is about (in no particular order): a debt, a drug heist, two shotguns, and the fates of a handful of different individual criminal enterprises. He likes to twist and tweak the action so that it warps. Ritchie favors what you might call directorial intervention he never lets you forget that he’s there, whether that’s through slow motion, voice-over meta-commentary, or still photographs used to accent the heightened sensations of a drunken night or a frenzied fight. That fried quality seems to enhance Ritchie’s style, which he is just beginning to articulate here. Made for just over a million bucks and released in 1998, the film is weirdly colored yellow, like it was left out too long in the sun. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels came first. They have plots that are at once more tangled than a box of electrical cords and also, thanks to Ritchie’s penchant for voice-over and exposition, so easy to follow they could be children’s books. Both films are flashy, kinetic, and stylized to the point of kitsch they feature well-known actors and video-game violence, loud music and louder gunfights. Posters for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch are on a lot of dorm-room walls, and you can understand why.
GUY RITCHIE FILMS MOVIE
If x = the number of college dorm rooms with a movie’s poster on their wall, and y = the popular conception of that movie among adults who have graduated from college, then x is inversely related to y. Call it “the Dorm Effect,” a phenomenon that has colored the legacy of films like Fight Club, The Big Lebowski, Scarface, and Pulp Fiction. Its release prompts some questions: Why is Guy Ritchie making movies like this? And was it Hollywood that did this to him, or did he do it to himself?Īfter a decade and a half of simmering in the popular culture, it’s easy to dismiss Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, both of which Ritchie wrote and directed.
, a film that seems produced for no single living human being, comes out in theaters. But for Ritchie, certainly the second is preferable, because these are the movies Ritchie’s making.