A get-rich-quick heist, as usual, is the cause of everything. Eddie (Nick Moran), Bacon (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), and Tom (Jason Statham), a hunky quartet of wanna-be high-rollers, plot to win big in a poker game with Hatchett Harry (P.H. Moriarty), a London mobster. The game is fixed, however, and the aspiring punks find themselves with a few days to repay a gambling debt of half a million pounds. Their solution is to rob their neighbors, a ruthless band of drug dealers. Their neighbors also have plans, however, as do Harry and an assortment of other crusty ne'er-do-wells; and each scheme collides with the others with the giddy logic of a nuclear chain reaction.

Ritchie orchestrates the plots and anti-plots with the delight of a sadistic child whose artistic palette brims with cinematic pyrotechnics and movie allusions. Sometimes his showoff style seems gratuitous. But the performances -- especially by fierce footballer Vinnie Jones and the late, real-life tough guy Lenny McLean as two of Hatchett Harry's henchmen -- give the frivolity the needed flesh and blood. By the end of Lock, Stock, Ritchie's career shows signs of smoking.