Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Eddy is the sharpest player on the circuit but the game is a set-up, and Eddy leaves owing the underworld boss “Hatchet” Harry (P.H. Moriarty) half a million. Harry gives Eddy a week to come up with the money before he starts taking fingers as collateral. Eddy’s dad, JD (Sting) can cancel the debt by handing over his bar, lock, stock and barrel to his old adversary, Harry. JD refuses to give in, feeling his street-tough son can get himself out of his own messes. So, while Harry sends a couple of petty crooks to steal a pair of antique shotguns to add to his collection, Eddy and his mates plan a caper that will enable them to pay off Harry and make out like bandits! I

n a comedy of errors, and a helter-skelter ride through London’s gangland, the guns, cash, drugs and identities become all mixed up as a full complement of London’s lowlife get involved in a melee which even all their menace can’t handle. Full of energy and surprising twists at every turn, it’s a rollicking comedy that has it all, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”
 


Editor's Note

A brutally comic tale about a group of London friends who find themselves deep in debt to an East End tough, LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS is quick-paced, stylized, and highly entertaining. In his debut feature film, director-writer Guy Ritchie weaves a tangled web of shady, blithely eccentric characters and several storylines, all of them coming together in a gleeful explosion of murder and mayhem. When streetwise charmer Eddy (Nick Moran), the son of steely bar owner JD (Sting), botches a gambling scheme with his dad's nemesis, porn king Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty), he's got one week to come up with 500,000 pounds or he loses his fingers--and so do his friends Tom (Jason Flemyng), Bacon (Jason Statham), and Soap (Dexter Fletcher). While the pals scheme to make the money, Harry indulges his penchant for valuable antique shot guns, stolen for him by a couple of inept burglars. Soon the missing guns, a paranoid group of marajuana growers, a mean-spirited debt collector (Vinnie Jones) and his young son, and a violent bunch of thugs, are all thrown together in this tightly-woven, genuinely funny story that takes its inspiration from old British comic gangster flicks like THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN and more recent films like RESERVOIR DOGS and THE USUAL SUSPECTS.


Plot Summary

LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS is a kineticly comic tale that follows a group of Londoners who find themselves in over their collective heads after a sour card game. Luckily for them--or so they think--they discover that their neighbors are plotting a robbery, a perfect opportunity for the lads to stumble into some payback money. So the scams begin to pile....