@ Rudey
Ok don't believe me... here are C4 reviews of the three films
LAYER CAKE
As pure Friday night entertainment, Layer Cake won't leave you screaming for your money back. But as an entry into the once great sub-genre that was the British gangster film, it's of minor interest.
Verdict
Straining to deliver a more adult gangster film than Guy Ritchie has managed, Vaughn never achieves anything more than superficial story overburdened with plot. As a result, Layer Cake is like a stylised episode of 'Minder'.
LOCKSTOCK
Cockney crime caper that sees four likely-lads running fowl of hit man Vinnie Jones. A brash, brutal Brit-flick, ripe with hip, slang-rich banter, super-stylised snap-focus trickery, and a deliriously twisted plot that literally leaves you hanging
When it first came out, this was rapturously received by critics as a British gangster flick to rival Tarantino, although director Ritchie claimed it owed far more to The Long Good Friday. It's got the wit of Tarantino, but avoids his violent excesses and works more towards the miserablist sensibilities of a London soap opera.
There are a thousand plot twists, but the story is that a group of tyro crooks owe money they don't have to a pornographer, but when they hear their next door neighbours planning a raid on a group of dope growers, they decide to hijack the heist.
It's a slickly edited movie with no real stand-out performances (in fact some of the London accents are well dodgy), but the presence of soccer hardman Vinnie Jones - making his surprisingly effective acting debut - dragged the punters in while the fast-paced, entertaining direction and belly-laugh ending kept them happy.
Verdict
Slick, fast-talking mockney gangster movie that gave the world Vinnie Jones, Guy Ritchie and a briefly fashionable style of editing. Cool Britannia's riposte to Tarantino.
SNATCH
It's heists, bareknuckle boxers, scary gangsters and the familiar bumbling London petty criminals in the second offering from the man who is to blame for kicking off the 90s lad mag crime caper
Guy Ritchie's Snatch is to his smash East End crime debut Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels what Robert Rodriguez's Desperado was to his own first effort, El Mariachi. In other words, a slick reworking of the same ideas, with a heftier budget and Hollywood star to boot.
With Lock, Stock... numerous two-dimensional mockneys double-crossed each other for the sake of two antique shot-guns; in Snatch, it's a diamond, smuggled into London by Frankie Four-Fingers (Del Toro). And like its predecessor, Snatch's plot mechanics are initiated when its antihero (in this case Statham's boxing promoter, Turkish) finds himself in debt to a local ganglord (played by Ford, with wonderful menace). This time because his boxer (a gypsy bare-knuckle fighter played by Pitt) refuses to play ball and throw a fight.
Once again set in a mythical and masculine East End (where there are few women or policemen), we even have Vinnie Jones, nutter-for-hire, returning to do some more damage with a car-door. That's not to say Snatch is a bad film. It certainly eclipses the recent crop of sub-standard Lock, Stock... imitators. For what it's worth, Ritchie's stuff is enjoyable at face level, like a good anecdote you might hear down the pub. But you're unlikely to remember much in the morning. Of the ensemble, only Pitt truly shows his class, delivering an amusing yet emotive performance amongst a group of actors who - at best - are pandering to laddish culture.