Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

(Polygram)

British filmmaker Guy Ritchie serves up an audacious, frenetic, ultimately pointless exercise in scams, double-crosses, whimsical violence, and arty human folly, with a hunky quartet of wanna-be high-rollers plotting to win big in a poker game with a London mobster that, naturally, is fixed -- whereupon they resort to robbing a drug dealer. Ritchie orchestrates the plots and anti-plots with the delight of a sadistic child; by the end of this film, his career shows signs of smoking.