With four-letter words and violence by the bucketload, Guy Ritchie’s gangster flick had everything a 12-year-old boy could want – and it still does
Alex Hess
When I was 12, all that mattered was the certificate. That little coloured shape in the bottom corner of the video box was the be-all and end-all, and there was a rigid hierarchy: U-rated films were to be avoided at all costs, PG piqued little interest, 12 suggested there might be something in there worthy of attention: a bit of swearing, the odd moment of violence, maybe even a glimpse of flesh. The 15-rated films were where things got interesting. From my limited experience, that was a broad bracket that took in a whole new world of invective, some unnervingly moderate sex scenes and a decent amount of blood and gore.
But it was the 18-rated films that were the holy grail. That was where the really foul language flowed, where the sex got terrifyingly explicit and, crucially, where the real bloodletting went down. Even the certificate itself – white numbering against a background of deep, carnal red – carried its own exhilaratingly adult connotations. Human beings tend to want what they can’t have, and 12-year-old boys are no different: any film classified 18 was by definition a film I was desperate to see.
It goes without saying that I almost never got to. My parents being joyless authoritarians, catching an 18 film during my early teens required either treacherous fieldwork (buying a cinema ticket for one film, sneaking into another), meticulous domestic strategising (recording the 9pm film on Channel 5 in the knowledge that something slightly riper would be on straight after: a tactic that, due to the three-hour runtime of VHS tapes, resulted in a lot of half-recorded Shannon Tweed movies) or, most often, by engineering invitations to households with a more flexible view of BBFC guidelines than mine.
It was the latter tactic that got me to see my first 18-rated film in full, thanks to a new DVD player, bought by a mate’s dad, that had come with a stack of recently released films. Two of them carried the desired certificate: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – a British gangster flick starring Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones – and Crash, a slow-burn psychosexual drama about people who get erotic thrills from car accidents. We went for the gangster film.