Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Ritchie's directorial debut is a refreshing take on the familiar heist-gone-wrong scenario in which four mates - Eddy (Moran), Tom (Flemyng), Soap (Flexter) and Bacon (Statham) - find themselves landed with a sizeable debt after Eddy loses a rigged card-game to local crime boss 'Hatchet' Harry (P.H. Moriarty).

Faced with the unwanted attentions of Harry's fearsome head-dunking enforcer Barry The Baptist (Larry McLean) and freelancing debt collector Big Chris (Vinnie Jones), Eddy & Co have until the end of the week to come up with half a million pounds and things are looking decidedly grim.

That is until Eddy overhears a plot by their gangster neighbours to relieve some public school drug dealers of just that amount in cash, and so the quartet conspire to rob the robbers and settle the debt.

Of course, things never go according to plan and the lads find themselves embroiled in a vicious circle that seems to take in every thug, ponce, blagger and wideboy in East London, including a diminutive Afro-haired drug dealer and a pair of bumbling Scouse thieves hired by Harry to obtain a couple of valuable antique rifles - the 'two smoking barrels' of the title.

With a story more twisted than Fred West on a helter-skelter, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is a neat mix of (very) black comedy, Cockney rhyming slang and French farce in which comedy, on the whole, sits easily side by side with some pretty nasty violence.

Simon C. Williams