`LOCK, STOCK' LOADED WITH LAUGHS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

``Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' introduces us to some 30-odd lowlife characters in its first 20 or so minutes. All of them speak with thick working-class accents and - while hardly the most educated types in Britain - possess rich, inventive slang vocabularies. Many of these mostly young men favor close-cropped haircuts and menacing leers, and are played by actors even dedicated U.S. art house fans won't recognize.

What, you begin to think, is an American expected to make of this impenetrably English tough guy farce? But just when you're about to despair of ever understanding what's going on or being said, the characters and their affiliations start to crystallize and their bumptious cockney jive talk goes from ``sounds funny'' to just plain funny.

And then the movie really gets wild.

The first feature from English commercial-maker Guy Ritchie, ``Lock, Stock'' is a smart comedy about criminal boneheadedness. Its elaborate plot was clearly inspired by the likes of ``The Usual Suspects'' and ``Pulp Fiction,'' as was its impudent verbal dexterity. But Ritchie's creativity was truly stoked by those much-copied films; ``Lock, Stock'' is a distinctive vision, not a rip-off.

A helpful voice on the soundtrack introduces some of the characters; others just appear going about their (almost exclusively illegal) business, and part of the fun is trying to figure out just how they're all going to mess each other up.

Our main lads are four boyhood pals from London's grimy East End. Eddie (Nick Moran) doesn't do much but fancies himself a card shark. He gets his mates - Tom (Jason Flemyng), who runs a crooked pawn shop; Bacon (Jason Statham), who sells stolen goods on the street; and Soap (Dexter Fletcher), who cooks for a restaurant - to stake him to a game run by the local crime boss, an old reprobate named Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty). The game is fixed, Nick loses 500,000 pounds the boys don't have, and Harry gives them a week to get the money before he starts collecting their fingers.

Harry's also obsessed with two antique shotguns - the double barrels of the title - that a pair of bumbling burglars from up north stole for him but resold to a fence. As things get absurdly complicated, the guns, which change hands with running-gag regularity, become symbolic of how every crook in the movie is so idiotically focused on his own limited agenda he can't see the wider picture of what's really going on.

Of course, the smartest of Oxford dons might have difficulty doing that. Besides Eddie's boys, there are at least four better-organized gangs, not to mention the northern thieves and Harry's henchmen, who include a delightfully intimidating giant of a man (the late Lenny McLean, a bare-knuckle boxing star

who actually once worked as an enforcer for the notorious Kray brothers' mob) and Big Chris (soccer bad boy Vinnie Jones), who chastises blokes he's torturing if they curse in front of Little Chris (Peter McNicholl), the young son he dotes on and brings to all of his assignments.

Got all that? Well, there's more. Way more.

``Lock, Stock'' flirts with that very English notion of being too clever by half, yet at a certain point an oddly satisfying, dark comic inevitability sets in. With the exception of a few clever surprises, you become aware of how the whole thing's going to play out just as it's preparing to. But instead of getting that old, disappointed feeling predictable movies give us, this one operates more like an enjoyable reward well-earned, seeing as how we had to pay so much close attention leading up to it.

``Lock, Stock'' does not boast anything like ``Usual Suspects' '' narrative intricacy or ``Pulp's'' thematic depth. It is superficial by comparison, but delightfully so - and, though violent, nowhere near as shockingly brutal as most crime movies of the '90s are. It's just a great comedy of dumb macho misbehavior, convincingly detailed and hilariously heightened in all the right places.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' (R; language, violence, drug use, nudity).

The stars: Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, Jason Statham, Steven Mackintosh, Nicholas Rowe, Vinnie Jones, Lenny McLean, Sting, P.H. Moriarty.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. Produced by Matthew Vaughn. Released by Gramercy Pictures.

Running time: One hour, 46 minutes.

Playing: Century 14, Century City; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Criterion, Santa Monica

Our rating: Four stars.