Steven Soderbergh's The Limey is a highly polished and knowing thriller that plays like a tricky essay on the unattainable. Its premise is simple. At the end of a nine-year stint in jail, London gangster Wilson (Terence Stamp) turns up in LA to investigate the mysterious death of his daughter who was involved with record producer Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda). It doesn't take Wilson long to establish that there was nothing mysterious about his daughter's death and a cat and mouse caper between two 60s film icons
quickly ensues.
Despite its setting and genre, the film is more affected by the languorous
pace of sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh's 1989 breakthrough film, than by last year's dazzling thriller which put him back into the Hollywood premier league, Out of Sight. The Limey is a sort of Out of Place, or Out of Time, a film about people unable to communicate because they have nothing in common and are literally speaking a different language. It is about a hoodlum who would have been incongruous in the London of 10 years ago, but who seeks revenge in an alien culture that he cannot begin to understand.
The film doesn't sustain a tension as well as it might, but it articulates
its theme through comedy and a brave (and time-consuming) poetry. Wilson is
a man who arrives in sunny LA locations for a butcher's hook: his rhyming
slang is the film's running joke because nobody in the film understands it.
One of the funniest scenes involves Wilson explaining himself to a tough
black cop who is totally flummoxed by the combination of linguistic
fireworks and sheer irrelevance. The comedy is stylised because it is verbal
(and it is funny) but also because Terence Stamp plays Wilson as if he were
self-consciously reading the part of "Terence Stamp". Stamp stands inside
and outside The Limey, an actor commenting ironically on his public persona while embedding that out-of-place persona in the movie.
Such a knowing performance is appropriate for Soderbergh's style, a
tour-de-force of lapidary editing that manipulates the imagery and
soundtrack so that they regularly mismatch, filling the film with ghosts and
remembered images. From the very beginning we are given to understand Wilson
as a ghost in his daughter's life, and the real test of the success of The
Limey will depend on whether you truly believe in, and are therefore moved
by, those ghostly images that represent their relationship. Slightly
unsatisfying, The Limey is nevertheless full of memorable imagery and set-pieces.
Reviewed by Douglas McCabe
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