Guy Ritchie | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

Though he may have enjoyed cultivating his image as a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, British filmmaker Guy Ritchie's roots were in England's upper class. Nonetheless, Ritchie directed some of the most stylish caper comedies about blue-collar thugs and other lower-class misfits ever to emerge from his native land. Starting with "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" (1999), the director arrived onto the filmmaking landscape with a unique twist on an old genre that employed flashy camera moves, punchy dialogue tinged with thick co*ckney accents, and a seemingly endless series of double-crosses that landed a motley crew of East End thugs in more trouble than they ever wanted. Ritchie built on the attention he received from "Lock, Stock" with a second London crime saga, "Snatch" (2000), which some complained was nothing more than a variation on his previous film. Though he temporarily became a laughingstock - along with his pop megastar wife, Madonna - for their dismal remake "Swept Away" (2002), Ritchie nonetheless had tried something different. He soon reinvented himself as a capable director of mainstream Hollywood fare with hits like "Sherlock Holmes" (2009) and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (2015).