Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a 1998 neo-noir black comedy crime film written and directed by Guy Ritchie.

It follows a heist involving a confident young card sharp who loses £500,000 to a powerful crime lord in a rigged game of three-card brag, prompting him to pay off his debts by enlisting his friends to help him rob a small-time gang operating out of the apartment next door.

After the incompetent thieves unwittingly sell them to Nick "the Greek", a local fence, Barry threatens them into retrieving the guns.

Meanwhile, Eddie returns home and overhears his neighbours, a gang of robbers led by a brutal man called "Dog", planning a heist on some cannabis growers loaded with cash and drugs.

They transfer the loot to their own van and return home, knocking out the warden and dumping him by the road before arranging for Nick to fence the drugs to violent gangster Rory Breaker.

Rory threatens Nick into giving him Eddie's address and tasks one of the two surviving growers, Winston, to identify the robbers.

While the friends celebrate at JD's bar, Dog's crew, having accidentally discovered that they were robbed by their neighbours, set up an ambush in Eddie's flat.

Having discovered the carnage at their flat and their loot missing, the four friends head to Harry's office, finding a second set of corpses, and decide to take the money for themselves.

Back at the bar, Eddie, Bacon and Soap dispatch Tom to discard the guns, as they are the only remaining evidence linking them to the case.

Leafing through the catalogue, the three friends learn that the shotguns are actually far more valuable than they had realised and frantically call Tom to dissuade him from disposing of them.

The film ends with Tom leaning over Southwark Bridge, holding his mobile phone ringing in his mouth, as he prepares to drop the guns into the River Thames.

As stated in filmscouts.com:Although it was Ritchie's first feature, his previous short film The Hard Case was sufficiently impressive to secure interest not only from financial backers but also persuaded Sting to take the role of JD.

[15] John Ferguson in Radio Times called the film "the best British crime movie since The Long Good Friday".

[16] Roger Ebert in Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "Lock, Stock is fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive".