Advertisers have spent years creating an imaginary type of person: the cool cigarette smoker, the suave beer-drinking ladies' man. We come across these characters every day in magazine ads, where they exist in their own phony two-dimensional world.

Emerging from a past directing commercials for British television, newcomer Guy Ritchie accomplishes the seemingly impossible. In his energetic debut Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, he transforms four of these soulless, ultra-hip twentysomethings into a band of likeable heroes.

Nothing can prepare you for the twisted scrapes that face the four (un?)lucky blokes from London's East End as they hustle money, lose it all in a high-stakes card game and run up against every type of bad guy imaginable trying to pay off their debts. Mixing bizarre characters and situations with lively, unexpected camerawork, Ritchie immerses his audience in the story with a natural ease I haven't felt since Bound, the Wachowski brothers' slick lesbian mob caper.

Like a good Spielberg film, LS2SB is clearly the work of someone who knows how to manipulate his audience. Ritchie plays each precious moment for its full effect, offering us the cinematic equivalent of a Molotov cocktail. In fact, Ritchie's mastery of the visual language is so adept that the film's thick accents—the fatal barrier that alienated some American audiences from British imports like Trainspotting—shouldn't obscure the convoluted story, though a few of the jokes are certain to slip by.

With its smooth slow-motion and high-speed effects and its invigorating hit-filled soundtrack, LS2SB appears to be the pinnacle of style over substance. Surprisingly, nothing about the plot was contrived just to set up a shot or sequence. Every jaw-dropping moment flows from the story, dangerously over-the-top but absolutely essential.

For the first time, I felt that I had seen a film in which style and substance were equal partners. After LS2SB, we can never go back to a sloppy film that relies entirely on the strength of its script, nor can we ever excuse the disconnected visual extravagance of someone like John Woo. From now on, these elements must compliment each other.

In the film's best example of visual storytelling, the camera shows us everything we need to know when Eddy loses £500,000 in a fixed card game. We watch Eddy from above as he leaves the room, the camera swaying woozy and lightheaded. Using simple overlap and timing tricks, Ritchie creates one of the most effective representations of a state of mind ever caught on film, cueing us as we pass into the second act.

LS2SB exists in a new kind of universe, one in which the boundaries separating film, advertising, music videos and pulp comic books have dissolved completely. From the over-saturated retro look of recent Skyy Vodka ads to the stereotyped goons and locations of old detective comics, the film's technique will work for the media-savvy MTV generation and will leave older audiences gasping to keep up. Cinematically, Ritchie owes quite a bit to hot 90s directors like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, whose loud, flashy styles made self-indulgent cinema acceptable.

As the newest installment in a wave of ain't-crime-cool films, LS2SB warrants its comparisons to Pulp Fiction, the film that jumpstarted the genre. After all, Tarantino parallels usually refer to borrowed techniques like overlapping storylines or the Mexican standoff—elements which trace back at least as far as Kubrick's The Killing.

Ritchie borrows none of Tarantino's innovations, not his so-banal-it's-cool dialogue or the slow, almost lyrical pacing he uses to construct a framework in which crime and violence may fester. Instead, Ritchie fashions a unique style that emerges from its influences, rather than simply repeating them as 2 Days in the Valley and so many others have tried.

Everything in this complex labyrinth serves a purpose. Ritchie uses such a frenetic pacing to keep the story moving that we can actually forget details as outrageous as a flaming man until an explanation surfaces later on. The film's finest moments emerge from such unpredictability. An example? Without giving anything away, let's just say that the character who appears to be the most useless catches us completely by surprise in a burst of Rambo-esque bravura.

LS2SB is probably as violent a movie as you'll see this year, yet Ritchie keeps most of the carnage off-screen. He shows us the aftermath but rarely the act. Characters can (and frequently do) lose their feet, their arms or their lives, but we never see it in a Tarantino-style blaze of gunfire.

I sense that, like Pulp Fiction, LS2SB will spawn a new generation of rip-offs, derivative works that won't share Ritchie's expert knack for comic unpredictability. With Tom Cruise already arranging to remake the film with an American cast, the first of these nightmarish productions can't be far away. Ritchie knows the way movies are going and welcomes the opportunities of sensory-overload filmmaking. Much to my surprise, I find myself hoping everyone else will catch up.