October 8, 1999 | Terence Stamp glides through the mean streets and posh estates of L.A. like a vengeful wraith in The Limey, Steven Soderbergh’s coolly stylized and aggressively stylish drama about a British ex-con’s pursuit of anyone even remotely involved with the death of his daughter.
Stamp plays a tough customer who’s known only as Wilson, and only on those few occasions when he deigns to introduce himself. More often than not, Wilson prefers to express himself non-verbally. A good thing, too, since most of the Los Angelinos he encounters have a difficult time understanding his Cockney rhyming slang. When he refers to a reluctant confederate (played with subtle wit by Luis Guzman) as his “China plate,” Wilson must take time to translate the term as “my new mate.” A federal agent with bigger fish to fry patiently listens to Wilson’s rants, then cracks: “There’s something I don’t understand…. Every single expletive deleted word you just said.”
Haggard yet hearty after the latest of several incarcerations -– someone fingered him for a heist at Wembley Stadium during a Pink Floyd concert -– Wilson has devoted what’s left of his life to making sure the right people die. He suspects the auto accident in which his twentysomething daughter was killed wasn’t an accident at all. So he flies to L.A. and begins to pose hard questions to bad people, many of whom figure they are dealing with some cranky and decrepit geezer. This is a big mistake.
Early in The Limey, some thugs boot Wilson out of warehouse, rough him up a bit, then stroll back inside. Wilson picks himself up, dusts himself off, takes a gun out of his waistband and walks back into the building. Soderbergh keeps his camera, and the audience, outside. All you hear is gunshots and a few screams. And that is all you need to hear. Much like Wilson — who turns violent only when he must, and usually avoids flashy macho posturing — Soderbergh doesn’t feel compelled to press things. He assumes you are smart enough to take one look at this guy and know, without always being shown, what he is capable of doing.
Here and elsewhere, The Limey plays like a multifaceted inside joke for film buffs, the kind of movie made by and for people who have seen lots and lots of other movies. Working from a script by Lem Dobbs, Soderbergh deconstructs and reassembles the narrative with attention-grabbing embellishments – moody slow-mo snippets, violent fantasies, images that recur like fragments of a dream. (You don’t discover until the very end whether one particular fragment is a flashback or a flashforward.) But the basic plot bears more than a passing resemblance to Get Carter, the classic 1970 gangster melodrama starring Michael Caine as a cold-blooded Cockney hit man on the trail of his brother’s murderers. Indeed, Stamp -– who shared an apartment with Caine when both men were struggling actors -– often sounds as though he’s mimicking his former roommate.
Soderbergh cast the lead roles with a mischievous appreciation for the baggage that accompanies his actors. Stamp appears as a much younger man in “flashbacks” that actually are clips from Poor Cow, a 1967 working-class tragedy in which he portrayed a feckless petty thief. On one level, the clips evoke a melancholy pity for the dreamy hunk who has grown up to be a hard-faced, death-dealing criminal. But Soderbergh also uses the clips to play on memories of the promising British actor –- acclaimed for Billy Budd, The Collector and Far from the Madding Crowd -– whose stardom began to dim when the 1960s ended.
As the pathetically clueless and self-deluding villain of the piece, an amoral record producer who used to cohabit with Wilson’s daughter, Peter Fonda doesn’t need any film clips to make a similar impression. All he has to do is start talking about life in the ‘60s, or drug dealing in the ‘90s, and you’re suddenly wondering if his character, Terry Valentine, really is a miraculously recovered Captain America from Easy Rider.
To be fair, it should be noted that there is a legitimate payoff for all this self-reflexive nostalgia: The genuinely surprising climax of The Limey relies on our awareness that the past is always with us, ever ready to reach out and backhand us. More important, the movie can be enjoyed on its own merits as a newfangled take on an old-fashioned hard-boiled melodrama. You don’t need to know anything about the other films that inspired or influenced it. In fact, you don’t even have to know anything about Terence Stamp or Peter Fonda.
A decade after making a big splash with sex, lies & videotape, his audacious debut feature, Steven Soderbergh has settled into a decidedly more conventional groove with The Underneath, Out of Sight and now The Limey. He appears most interested in bringing a playful spin to genre conventions, and infusing familiar stories with nimble intelligence, sardonic humor and visual virtuosity. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, there’s nothing wrong with that. Certainly not when the result is a movie as fine as The Limey.
