LockStock - Revisted

Last year I wrote more about the story of Lock Stock rather than the Art and development side. After watching it again, this time around I started to see things I missed before. In terms of Art direction it had a strong use of yellow tones throughout, thrown in with a mixture of greys and browns, the odd red and green lighting to but one thing I noticed was how blue kept popping up again and again. Not just blue lighting but I noticed how the characters tended to wear colour quite often.  

The characters are great, the way they act the way they are dressed says it all about them. The really captured the feel of what more modern gangs of London are like. Similar to L.A. confidential, when I talked about how the characters seem to just float onto the stage, in this film the actors seem to barge their way onto the stage with a strong sense of character. What I mean is everyone in the film comes on as ‘I am everything, give me what I want or you’re dead’ attitude.  Almost every character we see is dressed in a smart uniform, carrying a dangerous weapon, with a no-nonsense attitude towards everyone and they all have that deep typical London accent, it makes you scared off visiting London.

I remember saying last time that everything in the movie is about money, guns, drugs, respect and women, which it pretty much is from start to finish. It has a fear factor added to it by this but it tends to soften the strong sense of fear by adding little quirky jokes in quite a lot. There are two characters from the north that are kind of like the jokers throughout the film, they have a scouse accent which I feel is one of the elements of breaking up the hard core violent drama.

The streets of London a dangerous place, I think the film captures these rough streets quite well. Typical grey, dull English streets wherever you go which is where I feel the lighting plays a big role to give it some nice bright colours in the film so where not just seeing dull boring, possibly bleached colours throughout. It was kind of like watching a more extremely violent version of Eastenders, not to get into that too much, but you do even see Phil Mitchell get as angry as Vinnie Jones from the film.

I noticed how reds kept popping up to, it’s as if during the day the saturation is turned down and during the night they turn it up quite a bit. The nights are dark but lit up well which again, I think breaks up that dull feel of natural England.