Testosterone in trouble - Shots in the Dark - the movie, 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' is an antidote to feminism

Interview, Feb, 1999 by Graham Fuller

This month's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Bar rels, the first feature from pop-videos and commercials director Guy Ritchie, is an ingeniously crafted British crime caper that was a smash on its home turf. The story of four young opportunists - Eddy (Nick Moran), Tom (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), Bacon (Jason Statham) - trying to extricate themselves from the [pounds]500,000 gambling debt they owe porn king Hatchet Harry (P. J. Moriarty), it further involves a crew of posh, languid drug dealers, their Afro-sporting West indian paymaster, a rival outfit led by a Cockney nutcase called Dog, and two inept Liverpudlian burglars who steal and then lose a pair of priceless antique guns coveted by Harry.

Lock, Stock - begrimed with the neo-Dickensian aura of modern London - could be described as an escapist antidote to Gary Oldman's bleak house of a movie, Nil by Mouth (1997). Slickly calibrated and dryly funny, jammed with contemporary Artful Dodgers and Bill Sikeses, Ritchie's film hurtles pell-mell through a London underworld abstracted from any civilian reality, except in the pre-credit sequence - showing street grifters Bacon and Eddy scramming from the cops - which pays homage to, or rips off, the opening sequence of Trainspotting (1996). Its true precursor, though, is Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), which one suspects Ritchie of studying at home on his VCR night after night after night.

Like Tarantino's legendary debut, itself a cult hit in England, Lock, Stock is not so much a testosterone lest as a testosterone dream (or nightmare, depending on your point of view). Not only is it surreally devoid of non-criminals - beyond a repeatedly beaten traffic warden (Reservoir Dogs' lone cop had his ear sliced off) - it's a comic fantasy of masculinity at its most willfully sociopathic. As if to enforce this idea, Ritchie cast tabloid icon Vinnie Jones as Harry's polite but intimidating collector, Big Chris. In Jones's heyday as captain of the Wimbledon soccer team nicknamed the Crazy Gang for its rugged style, he was frequently ordered from the field for his brutal tackling and abusive manner. Gentlemanly isn't the word for it: The most famous photo of Jones shows him squeezing the testicles of star player Paul Gascoigne, who's howling with pain. It's a short step from soccer psycho to movie thug; Jones, whose movie debut is relishable, would've been a match for Lee Marvin at his nastiest.

Big Chris is accompanied on his errands by his small, foul-mouthed son. You get the sense that his wife, understandably enough, has left him. The point is worth making since Lock, Stock has been designed as a film without women, beyond a characterless stripper (the requisite T&A backdrop for a crime-world "meet"), a sixtyish poker dealer who looks like she's been cured in cigarette smoke, and one of the posh dealers' mute girlfriend. When the latter emerges from hiding and blasts an assault weapon at the men raiding her boyfriend's lair, she stops the film dead in its tracks. Being a female and firing a gun, it's as if she's interrupting the movie ideologically. We can't have this, Ritchie must have thought, because he immediately has Dog punch her out.

So this is a dream, then, a dream of a world unencumbered by the dangers of female energy or power, of the too-sweet trap of sex and the complications it brings - a little boy's dream. Whether Ritchie knows it any more than Tarantino did when he made Reservoir Dogs, or Robert Aldrich when he made The Dirty Dozen (1967), Lock, Stock - its title resoundingly metallic and determinedly masculine - is a cast-iron repudiation of women as much as it's anything else. But unlike such classic English gangland films as Get Carter (1970), The Long Good Friday (1980), and Mona Lisa (1986), all of which supplied Michael Caine and/or Bob Hoskins with threateningly sexy women, Lock, Stock is a film without emotional resonance. Its balls may be big but they're empty.

I don't want to press the claim that Lock, Stock's fear of women, if that's what it is, is a paranoid reaction to feminism, although the movie is a late addition to the so-called lad culture that burgeoned in Britain in the mid '90s. The fact is, cinema has always been riddled with pictures about men fleeing from or shutting out women - from prison, pirate, and gangster films to Westerns and war films, significantly those movies, that tote the most guns. Foreign legion films are a particularly good example, as the heroes in them have invariably joined up to "forget" the women who broke their hearts. If director Josef von Sternberg flipped that idea on its head by having a smitten Marlene Dietrich follow Gary Cooper into the desert in 1930's Morocco, a year later Laurel and Hardy's Beau Hunks humorously reinforced the idea of female treachery by having all the legionnaires carry a photo of the same femme fatale. When women such as those played by Joanne Dru in the John Wayne Westerns Red River (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) infiltrated male enclaves, the result was usually chaos. Rim noir, meanwhile, was nothing if not the collective unconscious's recognition of man's fatalistic susceptibility to sexually predatory women and his irresolvable desire to live with them and without them. And since it seemed to subvert patriarchal values, noir was approvingly reevaluated by feminist film scholars of the late '70s.