The Limey Review
by Bill Chambers (wchamber AT netcom DOT ca)October 8th, 1999
THE LIMEY *** (out of four)
-a review by Bill Chambers ([email protected])
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Bring a date.)
starring Terrence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman screenplay by Lem Dobbs
directed by Steven Soderbergh
If your story’s villain isn’t particularly heinous, give him/her a tic or habit; at the very least, annoy us. The Limey’s bad guy, a record producer who goes by the lone title Valentine (Fonda), is always inspecting his teeth and checking his gums with a Sulca brush. (Irritatingly so.) He likes to show off his pearly whites.
Wilson (Stamp), a "limey", wants to wipe that smile off his face. Upon release from an English prison, Wilson ventures to California in pursuit of Valentine, his daughter Jenny’s killer. He’s a Cockney shark out for vengeance, matter-of-fact tough and unafraid. The movie began for me when the sixty-something Wilson took out a factory full of thugs with his pistol—after they beat him up. The Limey is about an absentee father’s ("I watched her grow up...in increments," he tells a friend) search for redemption through violence. He will deny his own physical pain until his task is finished.
When he first arrives in L.A., Wilson hooks up with Ed (Luis Guzmán), the man who informed him, through letters to his cellblock, of Jenny’s demise. (Ed, an ex-con himself, met her in an acting class.) In a refreshing change of pace, Valentine’s henchmen leave Ed alone—no surprise visits in the middle of the night, no car bombs, no kidnapping Ed’s loved ones... That wimpy Valentine is a bundle of nerves when he finds out about Wilson also impressed me. "Oh man, I’m screwed," he wails to Avery, his head of security (Barry Newman). Avery and Wilson are about the same age; it’ll be an interesting fight.
The plot avoids Death Wish parallels at every turn. The filmmakers even manage some wry commentary on moviemaking that doesn’t feel imposed upon the material. (Can a California-set tale avoid mention of Hollywood?) The obvious culture clash between Wilson and the L.A.-types (Bill Duke’s policeman responds to one of Wilson’s frantic monologues, "The one thing I don’t understand is every motherfucking thing you just said") is handled coolly—without overplaying it, Soderbergh lets us know that we’ve never seen a character like Wilson in a film like this before.
Soderbergh got carried away in the editing room, however. Imagine an entire motion picture structured the way his brilliant, dual-timeline love scene montage was in Out of Sight. I was distracted to the point of contention at several points in The Limey by cinematic technique. (Sometimes, four or five scenes are happening at once, though the narrative magically remains coherent.) I must write that Stamp’s mesmerizing performance eventually drew me back in, every time. I guess I prefer so-called invisible cutting.
I was rooting for the cold yet sympathetic Wilson, perhaps because he speaks just like my grandfather. (Though I pitied poor, just plain pathetic Valentine.) Stamp wraps his lips around every syllable, drops letters from the beginnings or the ends of words, and has a whole dictionary of unfamiliar slang. (For a sampling, visit the film’s official website by clicking here.)
With ingenuity, Soderbergh integrates footage of Stamp for flashback purposes from an early Ken Loach effort called Poor Cow. Stamp seems so genuine as Wilson that we feel as if we’ve never seen him act before, that these snippets of a 1967 drama are photographed memories of the character in his youth.
-October, 1999
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
