Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels  Guy Ritchie wrote and produced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998. It is a British crime comedy film starring Dexter Fletcher, Jason Flemyng, Nick Moran, Steven Mackintosh, Jason Statham Vinnie Jones and Sting.

The film is about a young card sharp who loses £500,000 to a powerful crime lord in a three-card brag game which was rigged. He and his friends decide to rob the gang next door to pay off his debt.

The Main Story

Eddie, Tom, Soap, and Bacon are long-time friends who decide to club together to raise £100,000 so that Eddie, their card sharp friend can play in a high stakes three-card brag game run by Harry Lonsdale, a crime lord. However, Harry has rigged the game, and Eddie lands up owing him £500,000.

Harry likes a pair of expensive antique shotguns that are up for auction and gets his enforcer Barry “the Baptist” to hire two thieves, to steal them for him. By mistake, the thieves sell the shotguns to someone else called Nick “the Greek”.

One day Eddie overhears his criminal neighbours planning a heist on some cannabis growers. Eddie and his friends decide to rob the neighbours when they return from their heist.

Tom goes to Nick the Greek to buy guns and lands up with the two antique shotguns.

The neighbours’ heist is a success, and they return with bags of money. Eddie and his friends rob them as planned and drive off with the money.

The movie proceeds with many different characters all chasing each other to get their hands on the cash. In the end, the friends were robbed of the money but are left with the two antique guns.

The Ending

The friends are arrested but declared innocent due to lack of evidence. However, they still need to dispose of the guns, not realising their value until the last minute. The movie ends with Tom about to throw the guns in the Thames while his friends desperately try to phone him.

The Good Thief

The Good Thief  Introduction

The Good Thief was filmed in Monaco and Nice in 2002. It’s a British French crime comedy and follows a heroin and gambling-addicted retired thief as he sets up his last big score, a massive heist of a Monte Carlo Casino. It stars Nick Nolte as Robert Bob Montague, Ryan Phillipe, Gary Oldman and other big-names.

The Main Story

Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief is distinctive amongst heist films as it offers all the right ingredients, namely lust, greed, bad luck and plain stupidity all colliding to ruin a well thought out heist. The film starts with Bob’s (Nick Nolte) ambling around the South of France broke and as high as a kite and slandering the young criminals surrounding his orbit.

That all changes when one of Bob’s crew informs him of a new score: a Monte Carlo Casino with millions worth of the world’s greatest paintings on its walls. However, these are duplicates and the originals are stored in a secure vault in a nearby building.

Bob plans to fool the police into thinking he’s there to rob the casino while he is robbing the building next door. This was back before the internet days of  best online casinos australia remember. It was all bricks and mortar.  Bob needs to assemble a diverse crew of hackers, safe crackers and diggers to pull this off. The police are keeping a close eye on Bob, and he is aware of that so he decides to play in the casino while his crew tunnel their way into the room.

The Ending

Things begin to fall apart as one of the crew shoots a man, another tells the wrong people too much, and Bob finds himself in massive debt to a vicious fence. Surprisingly not all works out for everyone in the end, and Bob enjoys an unexpected streak of luck at the tables. It’s an uplifting ending, for a heist film.

Croupier

Croupier  Croupier is a 1998 dark British movie set in the sinister and shadowy 1970s. It was directed by Mike Hodges and starred Clive Owen.

Croupier focuses on a struggling writer employed at a Casino as a croupier and strategically placed between the pit bosses and the bettors. It’s the movie that launched Clive Owen’s career.

The Main Story

Jack (Clive Owens) depicts a man damaged by his gambling father, a drunk and a womanizer. His father gets him a job as a croupier at a London casino. Jack soon becomes a skilled card manipulator with complete indifference to the player’s losses and wins and it’s only for as long as their shifts last.

Owens depicts a cold, controlled man who doesn’t gamble; however, he does not gamble at casino games of chance, but he places high-risk bets in his personal life.

Jack writes a book about an unfeeling croupier who gets a kick out of watching gamblers lose at the tables. The book was, in essence, based on his own life.

Over the years he gets drawn into the seedy side of the casino world of cheating, drinking and sleeping around.

The Ending

By the end of the movie, he juggles relationships with three women whilst scheming to defraud the casino.

Towards the end of the movie, Jack finishes his book and gets it published anonymously. It becomes a bestseller, but he continues to work as a croupier and live in his basement flat. He didn’t even buy himself a new car.

Croupier is a gambling movie with a twist and viewers get more than they bargained for with its unexpected ending. The message people take away with them in Croupier is about individuals trying to control and anticipate the odds of their lives similar to gamblers who are always trying to beat the odds.