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Yet the film so tightly holds on to its sense of humor, its love of East End patois, its fascination with lowlifes and the low deaths waiting for them, that the carnage is mostly punctuation. The movie is as buoyant as a floating corpse in a clown costume. Or, as one of the "good" guys says, "A little pain never hurt anybody."
Ritchie is not a film-school wonderboy. "He has no awareness of movie history, and in a way that's refreshing," notes executive producer Steve Tisch. "It sounds funny saying it, but Guy is a guy's guy." If he had given in to other impulses, he could have been, as other wise guys say, a made man. "I left school at 15," Ritchie says, "and got distracted by the ways of the underworld." He was arrested for (but not charged with) robbery after a police search of his home yielded TVs, VCRs and stereos with no serial numbers. Ultimately Ritchie determined that the outlaw life was "not a sensible vocation for me. I felt the only profit I could take from that world was to make a film about it."
Before directing TV spots and music videos, he traveled through Africa ("I discovered that if it moves, you can eat it") and dug trenches at sewer sites in Greece ("That gave me an appreciation for money that's invaluable now"). Ritchie shot LS&2SB, with its dozens of speaking roles and locations, for just $1.6 million. "When it comes to film budgets, I'm lethal."
That's just the sort of killer instinct Hollywood loves: an unerring commercial sense at the price of a street vendor's Rolex. Time will tell if Ritchie is the real goods. But as LS&2SB proves, he can blast out 107 minutes of hard, dark fun.
--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles