BEFORE: Back-to-back films directed by Guy Ritchie - and another caper film set in Britain's underworld.
THE PLOT: Four London working class stiffs pool their money to put one in a high stakes card game, but things go wrong and they end up owing half a million pounds and having one week to come up with the cash.
AFTER: This was even less coherent than "Snatch" in some ways, and suffered from some of the same problems - like too many characters, for one thing. At least in "Snatch" the guys had more memorable names, here they're referred to with nicknames like "Big Chris", "Soap" and "Bacon".
And again, the thick Cockney accents made it difficult for me to follow the plot at times.
This time, a poker game gets fixed, and a card player named Eddie owes a gangster 500,000 pounds, which leads to a desperate need for four guys to raise cash within a week. Through the thin London apartment walls, one of them overhears their neighbors planning to rob some marijuna growers (I think...) so they make plans to rob the robbers. There's also a theft of some antique guns (the two smoking barrels mentioned in the title, I think...) which are then bought by the men planning to rob the robbers to pay the gangster (I think...). The London crime underworld is apparently very small, because the only person to sell the stolen pot to is the guy who was paying to have it grown in the first place (I think...) and he's not happy about having to buy back his own stolen weed. And the guy who wants the antique guns is also the gangster who fixed the poker game and set the whole plot in motion (I think...)
THEN things get confusing, and messy - yet somehow there's something classic about it all, like a Shakespearean comedy-of-errors, crossed with a Tarantino shoot 'em up. Oh yeah, and Sting's in the movie for a few minutes playing Eddie's father, since Sting's wife produced the film.
The moral of the story, beyond the usual "Crime doesn't pay", is to never assume things - every time a character makes a mistake, it's because they made a false assumption. Like assuming that no one can overhear them, or that the person behind them is unarmed... sort of like slapstick with very deadly consequences.
But when you have a gang of four characters planning to rob a gang of four characters who have just robbed another set of four characters, you can see how things can get very hard to follow. That's 12 people to keep track of, plus the gangster, his henchman, his enforcer, and the main drug dealer and his gang...
RATING: 6 out of 10 shoe boxes (7 for sheer inventiveness, less one for being so confusing)
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