Explore the use of genre and narrative conventions in the opening sequence of Guy Ritchie(TM)s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Authors Avatar

Explore the use of genre and narrative conventions in the opening sequence of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

The first 10 minutes screen time of Ritchie’s ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ allows the introduction of the characters and a description of their role without the gangster hierarchy and the narrative thus it operates quite conventionally as an opening in terms of narrative. ‘Bacon’ has just set up his suitcase in a high street and we now see in plot time that he’s enticing buyers and selling his evidently stolen goods. We do not know the exact location of the scene but it seems to be 90’s London from the character’s appearance and the fact he has a south London accent, a conventional cockney sort of voice. We can predict that what the character is doing is illegal from the seedy location, a derelict looking road with garages behind them and from the fact he’s selling from a table and suitcase in the middle of the street with no other stalls or shops are around, also the goods are being sold from a suitcase, the suitcase is an icon within crime movies representing an illegal exchange and therefore suggesting for the audience the idea that nothing about the events here is legitimate or legal. An idea that is reinforced when uniformed police men begin chasing the character. A low non diegetic rhythmic musical beat begins when the character was shouting and selling and as the chase starts the musical soundtrack enters properly and is parallel to the pace of the chase, giving it the excitement necessary. When the chase begins we discover that another significant character is involved in the sequence as he announces the arrival of the police to his counterpart and also begins to run. The unknown, until now, characters are then introduced through a non-diegetic narrator voice over. This male voice over is conventional of a crime movie and is also used in similar films such as ‘football factory’. The voice over played Eddie and Bacon are running has the same accent as the characters and sounds like a gruff, dominant person as if they would be high in the criminal hierarchy but he sounds wise and mature and so we as an audience trust his judgement and comments on what is happening in the story. The use of a voice over in this particular film is conventional narrative device because of the genre of the film.

The voice over provides a back story for the two characters running, Eddie and Bacon, who have been edited into slow motion. The characters come out of slow motion and continue running down and dirty dark alley, where there’s graffiti on the walls etc, and run out of the shot. This sort of location, urban and seedy, as well as being dark is conventional for the genre and as from our previous experience of crime movies we know the criminals know these areas better than the police. We assume they’ve managed to escape as we see the staircase and the screen cuts to black and the title of the film appears letter by letter as if a type writer were writing it. It has the look of a crime report which could be seen as an iconic symbol for the audience that they are watching a crime film.

Join now!

The film then cuts to a shop location, like a corner shop or a newsagent, a familiar setting for the audience. Here we are able to confirm that the two characters we first saw did not get caught by the police because they enter the shop to talk to a new pair of characters that this scene’s narrative purpose is to introduce. The characters are all dressed quite well, almost business like, which seems odd in a corner shop, it makes them stand out and causes the audience to expect something different. The corner shop seems average but then ...

This is a preview of the whole essay