COMIC NIHILISM: 'Lock, Stock & Barrels,' 'Go,' 'Matrix'.

Charles Dickens is alive and well and working as a casting director in the East End of London. Well, not really, but it was interesting while watching Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels-a huge hit in England and doing pretty well here-to find that a Dickensian grotesquery in the look and sound of its villains could spice a modern gangster story. But, of course, spice is most needed when the meat of a story is not of the first freshness.

Because, as far as plot goes, you might as well be watching a Frank Sinatra Rat Pack movie, such as Robin and the Seven Hoods. Four young lowlifes in the East End, desperate to pay off a gambling debt, snatch a pile of loot from dope dealers who are backed by Caribbean gangsters. This sets off a chain reaction of double dealings which pits all the gangs in the neighborhood against one another. This is really a black comedy about a feeding frenzy: The gangsters are sharks maddened by the scent of blood, and we get to watch them feast in a very small tank. Pauline Kael wrote of the villains of The Maltese Falcon that they were "so ruthless and greedy that they become comic." That's true here, too, and the comedy is abetted by writer-director Guy Ritchie's dialogue, which has a cockney pungency and wit that would do Sam Weller proud (if Sam had been a creep).

But it is really in his casting and direction of the bad guys that Ritchie is truly Dickensian. I can't remember when I've last seen such a menagerie of animal-men: here, baldness and fat and scragliness and squinty eyes become manifestations of malice. If all the killings in the final reels are bearable, it's because we feel that a race of monsters is destroying itself so that humans (the four young hoods) may survive.

But how human are the heroes? Ritchie means for us to sympathize with them because: (1) they're more physically prepossessing than the older thugs (but who isn't?); (2) far less brutal (but, again, who isn't?); and (3) they stole out of sheer desperation instead of sheer greed (but, then again, they're in debt because of their gambling, which itself was motivated by sheer greed). Actually, don't we simply attend the fortunes of these louts because we are stuck with them as protagonists? Like all protagonists, even the vilest of antiheroes, they lead us into the story and their ups and downs give shape to the plot. But I could have cared less whether they lived or died and, in fact, I could scarcely remember their faces two hours after I left the theater, while the mugs of the old hoods have remained in my mind's eye for weeks. Though he disclaims the comparison, Ritchie has been hailed as a British Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) because, like the American, he uses violence for comic shock and his dialogue bops and zings. However, Tarantino's characters, though steeped in gore, can occasionally move you with their Hemingwayesque codes of loyalty and sudden accesses of compassion. Ritchie's punks stick together for no apparent reason other than they're the same age and they're used to drinking together.

The New Yorker's film critic, Anthony Lane, sneered at the actor Tom Cruise for exclaiming during a screening of Ritchie's film, "This movie rocks!" But I think the remark works both as endorsement and stricture. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels shakes you up, slaps you around, sends you out of the theater agreeably rattled. But, two hours later, you've got nothing to hum. Really good rock 'n' roll songs are hummable precisely because they do more than rock.

ock, Stock may have bits of Tarantino sprinkled into its Dickensiana but Go wouldn't even exist without Pulp Fiction as precedent, encouragement, model, and fund-raiser. I say fund-raiser because the bigwigs at Columbia surely financed the production of John August's script with its complicated, playful plot structure only because it is a slavish imitation of the earlier crime film. So, is Go anything except a Tarantino epigone?

Well, let's perpetuate an oxymoron and call it a worthy epigone. August's dialogue emulates the Tarantino spritz, and I must admit that this stuff, with its easygoing obscenity, nonstop insolence, and callow, untested nihilism, sounds more plausible coming out of the mouths of Go's twenty-year-old, semi-educated supermarket check-out clerks than when spoken by middle-aged, blood-drenched hit men. The three episodes that constitute the overall plot branch out from the initial situation: Ronna, desperate to raise quick cash to avoid eviction, takes over the night shift of a fellow clerk, Simon, a young limey eager to do a weekend in Vegas. (If you think check-out clerks can't come up with money to high roll in Vegas, you don't understand one particular aspect of this fantastic and ludicrous country of ours.) We then see: (1) what happens to Ronna when two guys, Adam and Zack, come to the store to buy drugs from Simon and offer Ronna big bucks to do the supplying instead; (2) what happens to Simon in Vegas; (3) what happens to Adam and Zack, who are not what they seem, after the drug deal.

The second and third stories are meant to be let's-descend-into-hell- just-for-the-fun-of-it exercises in comic nihilism. They tumble along adequately thanks to Doug Liman's direction, which is a hipper, smoother version of the kind of direction done for TV movies. But I was constantly aware of the hand of the scriptwriter ladling dollops of cynicism and violence onto a story already bursting with these elements.

In the first episode, August's writing, Liman's direction, and, especially, Sarah Polley's performance, all mesh to create a sufficiently harrowing portrait of an all-too-believable young American woman. We are never told why the evidently intelligent and (probably) educated Ronna is stuck at a dead-end job with no hope of a better one, but the all-encompassing contempt and self-contempt in Polley's eyes convince us that her situation is real. That she impulsively takes the chance to deal drugs to make her rent and that its illegality isn't an issue at all with her, that she then leaves her best friend in the clutches of a probably violent drug dealer so that he'll trust her with a loan, that she has the wit to make a bundle at a "rave" by peddling harmless pills as Ecstasy tabs but not the nerve to scream for the police when a killer chases her since she fears the police more than any killer-all this is quite convincing in the context that the filmmakers create: a Los Angeles of quick money, fleeting thrills, foundationless friendships, no love, and affectionless sex. It's often been remarked that L.A. is a city without a center. What a perfect place for a girl like Ronna.

believe the recent atrocity in Colorado will start a new wave of finger pointing at the entertainment industries and, as usual, works of substance will be rounded up and shoved into the same van with movies that are sheer dreck. Example of the latter: The Matrix. This lavishly praised sci-fi nonsense posits a world that looks and sounds just like ours but is actually controlled, indeed fabricated, by robots. But a few individuals in it are, literally, free thinkers. These get trained by guru Lawrence Fishburne to be kung fu psychic warriors who are morally justified in killing hundreds of cops because the police are unwittingly serving the establishment. Query: Didn't the Red Brigade, and other terrorists of that ilk, also believe that the Western world was "unreal" and a concoction of capitalism? And didn't this belief give them the license to kill both cops and innocent bystanders at random? Of course the whole farrago is just an excuse for good-looking Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss to dress in glamorous leather trench coats and mow down the opposition while striking poses worthy of models in Calvin Klein ads. The special effects now drawing hosannas from the critics are actually the worst things in the film (quite an accomplishment considering Fishburne's performance) since they don't open a vista onto beauty but only pound the viewer into submission.

The teen-aged killers of Columbine High School almost certainly did not see this movie, given the time frame of events, but The Matrix contributes to the cloud of unreality in which the movie's target audience, male adolescents, move, an unreality that, for some, can only be dispelled by violence.