lock, stock and two smoking barrels

The first movie I caught at Midtown Art Cinema (it was UA Midtown then) was Guy Ritchie's followup to LSAnd2SB, Snatch. The first thing my friend said when we stepped out was that it was so similar to LSAnd2SB. I hadn't seen LSAnd2SB, but now that I have, I can see his point. However, there is a lot that sets the two films apart. In terms of technique and narrative style, Ritchie's Snatch takes the slow-mo moments and montage-on-speed razor-rapid cutting from his first flick and spikes them with abundant amounts of rocket fuel. Both films are funny, but LSAnd2SB benefits from being the predecessor. Cool cockney slang (the DVD even has a primer under the special features) [see also: Ocean's Eleven, The Limey]. The mechanics of the goings-on won't be unfamiliar to people who have seen other flicks that seem to turn noir inside out thus getting it to regard itself in a comical manner. The good guys almost win, the bad guys lose (and they lose bad!), everything is connected in a web more intricate than the most complex graphs ever dreamt by a theoretician. A cool soundtrack as well. All in all, great fun.

Trust the guys at White Feather Films to take this film and distill out a piece of sorry bull dung like Plan. As if that wasn't bad enough, they took the first part of LSAnd2SB, diluted it with bad dialogue, bad performances, bad boring songs and cheap style to get the first part of their sorry flick. Now that they had four friends losing out to a gambling cheat and owing an NP-complete sum of money, they now needed a good way for them to get it back. LSAnd2SB's drugs angle would not work for the hapless Hindi film audience. So they ripped off another flick, Suicide Kings. Thus, Sanjay Gupta once again (even though he didn't direct the sorry meld) managed to take at least two foreign flicks and splice them to create a piece of dreck so uniquely his own.