I went looking for Lock, Stock… the series after finishing watching The Gentlemen on Netflix and immediately needed more Guy Ritchie content. I think that’s where most people who have watched it find it: at the tail end of a binge, slightly desperate, willing to try anything. I wasn’t expecting to actually love the series, though. It aired on Channel 4 in the summer of 2000, and disappeared so fast that even Ritchie fans I’ve spoken to didn’t know it existed until I brought it up. That feels like a genuine injustice, but it’s time to correct it.
One thing that I want to clear up before anything else: this isn’t a sequel to Jason Statham’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Statham isn’t in it, and Nick Moran isn’t, either. Ritchie and executive producer Matthew Vaughn built a new world from the same raw materials, including London’s East End, catastrophically bad decisions, criminals who talk like they’ve swallowed a dictionary of rhyming words, and an atmosphere of cheerful menace. The series has seven episodes, and, if you ask me, it’s a treat.
What Is Guy Ritchie’s ‘Lock, Stock…’ Actually About?
Four friends – Moon (Daniel Caltagirone), Jamie (Scott Maslen), Bacon (Shaun Parkes), and Lee (Del Synnott) – run a pub called The Lock somewhere in London’s East End. Each week, an object of significant value to the local underworld falls into their orbit, and they handle it in the worst possible way. The episode titles tell you exactly what’s coming, though. In “… And Two Hundred Smoking Kalashnikovs,” the gang accidentally steals a van full of AK-47s and fans the flames of an existing gang war through a series of decisions that are individually defensible and collectively disastrous.
Presiding over their misery is Miami Vice. No, I’m not talking about the American TV show. I’m talking about a local crime lord played by Ralph Brown, who brings a specific kind of cold patience to the role. Brown is probably best known as Danny in Withnail and I, and he carries some of that deadpan exhaustion into Miami Vice, a man who has seen everything and is irritated after discovering that these four keep making things worse for him. His enforcer, Three Feet, played by Christopher Adamson, handles the unpleasant physical work of roughing people up. The dynamic works because Miami Vice is never rattled, and the lads never seem to learn, so the gap between his composure and their chaos is the root of all the fun.
Ritchie co-wrote the 90-minute pilot, which is called “… And Four Stolen Hooves.” You can see his signature in the overlapping dialogue and in the way three separate plots collide in the final 10 minutes with unbelievable precision. The remaining six episodes went to writers Chris Baker, Andrew Day, Bernard Dempsey, and Kevin McNally, and, fortunately, they didn’t fumble.
‘Lock, Stock…’ Is the Show That Ritchie Completionists Keep Discovering Too Late
Myself included. Lock, Stock… is not Guy Ritchie’s 2024 Netflix series The Gentlemen. With that show, Ritchie had every resource he could ask for, plus creative control, and it shows in every frame. The Channel 4 series, on the other hand, is cheaper, faster, and you can feel the television budget pressing against the ambition in some places. None of that matters because the show isn’t even trying to be The Gentlemen. It’s trying to deliver seven episodes about four men getting in over their heads in increasingly inventive ways. And Lock, Stock… succeeds at that completely.
When I watch it now, with 26 years of distance, I realize how much future talent cycled through those episodes without any fanfare. Martin Freeman shows up in a supporting role. Bradley Walsh and Hywel Bennett appear, too. Watching the supporting cast feels like watching an audition tape that nobody thought to archive properly, and part of the pleasure of watching it today is thinking about how far some of the cast have come.
The TV anthology structure also ages better than the serialized narrative arcs from the same era. Each episode is its own contained pressure cooker, so you never have to worry about keeping track of anything. “… And One Big Bullock” follows the men attempting to break into the meat industry and somehow attract the Russian Mafia in the process. “… And a Good Slopping Out” sends them to prison on Miami Vice’s orders, tasked with retrieving a valuable key from an inmate called Toothless.
While the plots are absurd, Guy Ritchie’s plots are known for their absurdities. You buy every step of the logic, even as things become more and more unhinged. I find it telling that the show was made the same year Ritchie was deep in post-production on Snatch, arguably the peak of his career. He had every reason to phone this in as a quick IP extension, but instead, he imbued it with an abundance of invention. It’s definitely a must-watch.
