The Limey Review
by James Sanford (jamessanford AT earthlink DOT net)January 9th, 2000
As directed by Steven Soderbergh, "The Limey" is a thriller almost as jarring as the rhyming Cockney slang used by its central character, the stoic Wilson, played with frozen fire in his eyes by the great Terence Stamp. What sounds in synopsis like a fairly mundane story of vengeance comes across on the screen as a collage of images, music and crackling dialogue. Frequently, Soderbergh will take a simple conversation and stage it in different locations, then skip blithely between the various versions, using the soundtrack as the ribbon to hold the pieces together. Although the effect initially seems like a gimmick or perhaps a throwback to the "mod" caper films of the late 1960s, it turns out to be a clever way to handle Lem Dobbs' no-frills screenplay. To balance Stamp's anti-hero, Soderbergh has cast another icon of 30 years ago. As Terry Ballantine, a slick, devious record producer who represents the worst L.A. has to offer, Peter Fonda oozes cool charm and smarm. The director introduces both men with theme songs from the Flower Power era: Wilson gets the Who's "The Seeker" ("They call me the seeker, I been searching low and high/I won't get to get what I'm after 'til the day I die"), while Ballantine is saddled with the Hollies' bitter "King Midas in Reverse." "You're not specific enough to be a person," Terry's most recent bedmate tells him. "You're more like a vibe."
In contrast, Wilson is pure grit, an ex-con who's flown in to Terry's world to seek retribution for the death of his daughter Jenny (Melissa George) who perished in a suspicious car crash, apparently after getting too close to the truth about her boyfriend Ballantine. "The Limey" quickly builds to a clash between these two wildly different titans, both of whom are haunted by their pasts.
"What's England anyway?" one of Terry's cohorts cracks. "Some rinkydink country half the size of Wyoming where the cops don't even carry guns." Ah, but British criminals certainly do pack heat and, in Wilson's case, know how to use it.
There's plenty of violence in "The Limey," but what Soderbergh truly seems concerned with is creating an impressionistic mood piece. As he did in his last movie, the dynamic 1998 suspenser "Out of Sight," the filmmaker has great fun trying to catch his audience off-guard, tossing in a burst of humor when you least expect it (one of the guests at Terry's party confesses "the first Christopher Cross album -- wow, man, that changed my life"), or taking a few minutes of extra time to let Wilson talk about his alienation from Jenny with the young woman's best friend, an understanding speech coach (Lesley Ann Warren). Since Wilson spent most of Jenny's childhood in one prison or another, she began calling him "Daddy the Friendly Ghost."
The 1960s motif is further reinforced by Soderbergh's marvelous insertion of clips of the young Stamp playing a hood (named Wilson, coincidentally) in director Ken Loach's 1967 drama "Poor Cow." It's a smart alternative to the usual phoney-looking flashbacks we're used to seeing in Hollywood films, in which makeup artists struggle to erase 20 or 30 years from the faces and hair of middle-aged stars. James Sanford
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