Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels opened in 1998 as Ritchie's debut feature and was nominated for the BAFTA for Best British Film. The film established the late-1990s British gangster-cinema register that would continue through Ritchie's Snatch (2000) and a long subsequent commercial career. Vinnie Jones, the former Wimbledon footballer, made his acting debut in the film and became an unexpected Hollywood character-actor career as a result.

Four London mates (Eddy (Nick Moran), Tom (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher) and Bacon (Jason Statham, in a star-launching debut)) pool their accumulated savings together for one of them to play a rigged high-stakes three-card-brag poker game with the established East End criminal Hatchet Harry. The plan goes wrong, and the four end up owing half a million pounds to Harry, who collects debts in limbs through his right-hand man Barry the Baptist (Lenny McLean). The film follows the four men's attempts to recoup the money in the week they have to pay it back.

Ritchie's commitment to a register of fast-cutting MTV editing applied to British underworld dialogue, the Cockney-criminal slang vocabulary, and the broad-comic register sustained across the entire ensemble produced one of the most-cited British films of the late 1990s. The film's continuing cultural reach has extended through a generation of subsequent British gangster-cinema productions and has continued to anchor specific British-cinema nostalgic discourse about the late-1990s late-Cool-Britannia era.