All 7 Guy Ritchie Crime Movies, Ranked Worst To Best

Published Nov 15, 2026, 12:55 PM EST Simon Gallagher has worked in movie and TV journalism for more than 17 years. He has written more than 6000 articles and reviews, and edited thousands more. He is an expert in the entertainment industry, particularly in the golden age of screen superheroes. Simon is also a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic. Sign in to your ScreenRant account Alongside Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie is one of the only modern directors who's actually built a body of work directly on the back of his own voice. Yes, there have been deviations, like his live-action adaptation of Disney's Aladdin, but for the most part, when Guy Ritchie makes something, you know that Guy Ritchie made it. At the same time, though, after arriving like a hurricane with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998, Ritchie has gone almost out of his way to prove that genre shouldn't get in the way of him telling stories. Ritchie's best movies have included glossy spy romps, gritty World War II movies, hugely popular adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, and, of course, that billion-dollar success with Aladdin. Not everything has worked out massively well. Consensus suggests (a little cruelly) that his King Arthur movie, for instance, deserves to be forgotten. But no matter how far he wanders into franchise territory or away from the core gangster movie that he made at the start of his career, you can still spot a Ritchie joint very quickly. The editing is always fast-paced and energetic; the camera moves like it has somewhere to be ; and the dialog is always witty and rapid-fire. The cadence is always roughly the same. Though he's made some excellent movies in other genres, it's when Ritchie returns to the criminal underworld that his signature style seems to work so well, work the best. His romanticized world of small-town London crooks and international arms dealers has proved incredibly entertaining over the past 30 years, and he has refined, subverted, and revived his own blueprint, obviously with huge success, with Netflix's The Gentlemen series. 7 In The Grey (2026) 2026 saw Ritchie return to his crime roots, but for a very different movie from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In the Grey is probably his slickest looking crime movie, and unfortunately, it's also his most emotionally distant. It saw him reunite with Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal for a crime caper centered on a high-concept extraction team who are charged with stealing back a billion-dollar fortune from a ruthless despot. On paper, In the Grey should have all the hallmarks of a classic Ritchie heist movie. It has fast-talking fixes, a sharp sartorial style, and entertaining set pieces, but the muted critical reception on release comes as no surprise when you actually watch it. It doesn't have the same London swagger because Ritchie here aims for a more generic international caper style, and there's just not as much of the right Guy Ritchie personality as you'd want there to be. A lot of Ritchie's work embraces grime, and In the Grey is just a little too clinical. 6 Wrath of Man (2021) MGM / Courtesy Everett Collection One strange quirk of Guy Ritchie's movie resumé is that he seems to make movies so quickly that some land without any sort of cultural footprint at all. That's very much the case for Wrath of Man. Ritchie's 2021 reunion with Jason Statham was very different from their first two collaborations, which relied quite heavily on Statham's unexpected comedic chops that have largely disappeared as he's morphed into this era's answer to Bruce Willis. Here he's a lot more po-faced. Wrath of Man sees him play the enigmatically named "H", a mysterious newcomer to an LA armored truck company with a personal vendetta that's gradually revealed through a creatively unconventional timeline. Though it appears to be quite a generic action movie in comparison to Richie’s more stylish releases, critics were quite positive on it, especially the action sequences and the balance of multiple story threads. And Ritchie deserves credit for the way that he tells the fragmented story. It gives a conventional revenge tale more muscle, and so too does the excellent cast, which also includes Holt McCanally, Scott Eastwood, Joss Hartnett, and Eddie Marsan. 5 Revolver (2005) When Revolver arrived in 2005, critics were not kind and tore it to shreds, baffled by Ritchie's shift from cheeky East End gang wars to heavy-handed esoteric philosophy. But the same things that it was criticized for more than 20 years ago are exactly the reasons why it's aged better than might have been expected. Revolver once again teams Ritchie with Jason Statham, who plays Jake Green, a gambler out for revenge against a petty casino owner. The story actively embraces an existential anxiety that also stands apart from the rest of what Guy Ritchie's done since. As a result, Revolver is easily Ritchie's most misunderstood movie and deserves far more appreciation for its audacity, especially following the success of Snatch. Instead of making something that could have just been a direct follow-up to that, he swung for something genuinely strange, and he used the familiarity of a mobster revenge story to probe the very nature of human hubris. It looks great. Statham offers a strong performance, and Ray Liotta is on top-level form as a breakdown-prone mob boss. It does at times struggle under the weight of its own ambitions, but it's a bold subversion of the genre, and it's a fascinating companion piece to the rest of Ritchie's gangster movies. 4 RocknRolla (2008) After back-to-back box office flops with Swept Away and Revolver, Ritchie headed back to the comfort of the London underworld and started to show a little bit more of the blueprint that would later become The Gentlemen movie and TV series. RocknRolla was widely proclaimed a step back in the right direction and did make more money than its budget, and rightly so. The plot revolves around a massive real estate scam in London, which includes low-end hustlers, Russian oligarchs, bent politicians, and a heroin-addict rock star, played exceptionally well by Toby Kebbell. This may have been Ritchie playing in his comfort zone, but he brought together a strong cast, including Gerard Butler, Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, and Kebble, to flesh out an excellent group of characters and the joy is in spending time with them. Kebble's Johnny Quid, in particular, is one of the best characters ever introduced in a Ritchie movie, and he steals basically every scene he appears in. RocknRolla isn't exactly transformative. It was a much-needed return to the genre and his usual tropes for Guy Ritchie, but it was a welcome reminder of why everything he did was so good for crime movies. 3 The Gentlemen (2019) Richie has a lot of fun with clashing seemingly very different worlds together. Behind the camera, he often follows that trend with his casting choices, notably bringing in massive Hollywood stars like Matthew McConaughey in The Gentlemen and Brad Pitt in Snatch to operate in grubby, small-time crime underworlds that don't seem to fit them. In The Gentlemen, not only does he have McConaughey, he also clashes the disparate worlds of high society and London's criminal underbelly together to create a compelling, contradictory story. McConaughey plays Mickey Pearson, an American expat at the top of a lucrative marijuana empire, operating inside the estate of impoverished British aristocrats, who finds himself at the center of a massive gang war when he tries to sell his business off. The Gentlemen's cast is excellent, and everybody seems to be having a lot of fun, especially Hugh Grant in a career-best comedic performance as sleazy tabloid photographer Fletcher, Charlie Hunnam as Pearson's dry-witted consigliere, and Colin Farrell as the equally dry and even funnier, tracksuit-wearing Coach. They're all top-tier Guy Ritchie characters, and the story is as delightfully twisty, self-consciously funny, and, of course, violent as Ritchie gets. The movie obviously spawned an even more successful Netflix series, which is a standalone spinoff and not a continuation, but everything that you love about the series was born in this movie. Moreso, in fact. 2 Snatch (2000) Like the gentleman after it and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels before it, Snatch inspired a TV spinoff that was never quite as good, but the original movie was further explosive proof that Guy Ritchie was really not a one-hit wonder. Released in 2000, Snatch is basically Guy Ritchie's Pulp Fiction. He was given a bigger budget, could attract international star power, and he delivered another intricate, lightning-fast narrative centered around a stolen 84-carat diamond in the chaotic world of unlicensed bare-knuckle boxing. Lock, Stock... has been his announcement movie, but Snatch cemented Ritchie as a major voice in world cinema. He was helped along the way by an incredible performance by a barely understandable Brad Pitt as Irish Traveler boxer One Punch Mickey, and supporting roles from the likes of Benicio Del Toro, Vinnie Jones, Derek Farina, and, once again, Jason Statham. Even the characters who only get a moment or two on screen get an unforgettable line or a bizarre quirk, and the whole thing feels like an early greatest hits of Ritchie's signature style flourishes, including an excellent soundtrack. It's bigger, louder, and incredibly confident when you put it next to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and a lot of people would have it as his best crime movie, but this landmark of British pop culture could never be the best. 1 Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (1998) Image via MovieStillsDB If Snatch was Guy Ritchie's Pulp Fiction, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was his Reservoir Dogs: a lower-budget, high-energy burst of irresistible confidence and swagger that announced a major new voice to the movie world. Its various quirks and tropes have been so copied or mocked over the years that it's easy to forget how great they were when they arrived in 1998, but they grabbed an audience immediately and simply wouldn't let go. For all its twists, the plot is actually deceptively simple: four London chancers, played by Jason Statham, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran, and Jason Flemyng, lose a rigged car game and find themselves in hock for £500,000 to a local mob boss. It quickly escalates into a stylish, incredibly well-soundtracked comedy of errors that never loses its comic charm even as the bodies pile up. Everyone was instantly floored by the movie's raw personality, which relied heavily on incredibly sharp dialogue, excellent editing, and lightning-in-a-bottle casting choices, which also included former footballer Vinnie Jones as the immediately iconic Big Chris. The climax that sees multiple criminal factions unwittingly cross paths is an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, and the whole thing is both hilarious and endlessly quotable. It simply doesn't get old.