IMDb #137 Review: Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Source: Wikipedia

London lowlifes, big and small, run amok in the city. And holy balls, what wild messes they get mixed up in.

Four drinking buddies lose at cards to hardcore gamblers -- they now owe 500 grand by the end of the week, or else. The sort-of-hero's dad faces a choice: your bar, or your son's life. The friendly neighborhood cannabis growers indulge in reasonably paranoid security measures, or else get so blazed that they can't calculate how much cash they're stacking up. A psychotic Jamaican drug kingpin watches football at the pub. A tough bald hitman religiously practices take-your-prepubescent-son-to-work day.

And meanwhile, a mobster negotiates the sale of a pair of antique shotguns, hence the otherwise confusing title.

There's a lot of characters to keep track of.

Most have names like Barry the Baptist (drowns people) or Nick the Greek (he's Greek) or Hatchet Harry (don't ask), the man who presides over this sticky web of interwoven plotlines like a fat Cockney spider.

Everybody's harboring an agenda that clashes with everybody else's agenda. Double-crosses pile up like just another day at the tombstone factory. Bullets fly, people die. Drugs and shotguns and bags of cash pass through multiple sets of grubby hands. Downright idiocy results in more downright idiocy.

To make things even more perfectly confusing, the camera whizzes around like a GoPro strapped to an inebriated hummingbird. Who then mistakes the fat Cockney spider's plot-web for a trampoline.

I had no idea what was going on most of the time. But I didn't want to miss a millisecond of the manic fun. Once the credits hit, I had to remind myself to resume blinking.

It doesn't need to make sense the first time around. Just bask in the schadenfreude.

120 minutes.