Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Review

Made for about £800,000 with a cast that mixed actors, a former footballer and several genuine ex-convicts, it was the second-biggest British production at the UK box office in 1998, behind only Sliding Doors. The pleasure is structural. Ritchie sets loose a card debt, two antique shotguns, a cannabis farm, a pair of Scouse burglars and a debt collector with his young son, then steers every thread into one bloody collision with timing that is genuinely clever.

Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones make their film debuts, and Jones's Big Chris, gentle with his boy and terrifying with everyone else, is the performance people remember. Tim Maurice-Jones shoots it in tobacco tints with freeze frames and speed changes borrowed from music videos, and the dialogue is a feast of slang and elaborately phrased threats. What it lacks is any inner life: the four leads are interchangeable, and women barely register. Radio Times called it the best British crime film since The Long Good Friday, which is generous. Roger Ebert found it fun in a slapdash way, which is right.