The Limey stars Terrance Stamp as the titular character, an Englishman just arrived in LA, fresh from nine years in prison for armed robbery. He's received a letter with a newspaper clipping about his daughter's death in an automobile accident, and armed with no more than that news and the return address on the envelope, he makes his way to the sender's house and more or less forces the guy to help him track down his daughter's killers.
The guy, a friend of his daughter's from acting class, doesn't have any reason to disbelieve the news report, but dad is positive, and he acts quickly; buying guns and bullets from some Mexican gangsters, heading to the one address he knew might relate to his daughter's ex-boyfriend, and violently taking care of business.
The Limey is a fast-paced, gritty, character-driven tale of revenge, justice, and investigation, filled with oddball characters, clever writing, and some really inventive directing techniques. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
The Limey, 1999
Script/Story: 6
Characters: 8
Action: 6
Combat Realism: 7
Humor: NA
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 7
Overall: 8
It's not a brilliant film, but it is a solid mystery/revenge thriller that doesn't fall into any of the genre stereotypes/conventions. The plot unfolds in original fashion, and the characters are not cut from the usual mold. The tough guys in the movie are older men, and gorgeous trophy girlfriend isn't the dumb bimbo we expect her to be, the mobsters are real people with real reactions to stress, the minor characters have their own agenda and goals, the cops aren't corrupt or maniacal, and the bad guy isn't bad; he's just doing what many of us would do if caught in his situation.
I saw this film just recently, when I caught sight of the DVD at the library, but it's not a new movie. It was released in 1999, and didn't make any money in the US, despite excellent reviews. It's got a 7.0 average on IMDB, and a
89% from 76 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
The plot isn't nearly as dense as lots of thriller/mystery films; in fact it's pretty straight forward, as we stay close to the father on his "shortest route is a straight line" course through the various people who dare to oppose him. What makes the film work is the writing, and also the directing and editing, which are very stylistic and involving. The clever stuff is a matter of taste though, since while I quite liked them, they were singled out for scorn by most of the negative reviews I saw on RT.
The movie plays with chronology and memories in fascinating ways; we'll see Terrence Stamp's titular character driving somewhere, and cut into the scenes of LA are shots of him talking with someone. The dialogue from that scene begins while he's still driving, with the visuals cutting back and forth, until finally he arrives, gets out of the car, and goes to talk to whoever, in the scene we saw start a moment before. It sounds confusing, but it works almost seamlessly in the film, and it's actually quite a time saver.
For another example, there are several scenes with one long exchange of dialogue, but visuals from two or three different conversations. So we'll see two people talking in a car, and as their conversation plays without interruption we get scenes of them driving, then arriving at a restaurant, then talking in the restaurant, then leaving and walking along the pier at night. All while they keep talking, until the dialogue catches up with the scene and they're in lip synch again on the pier.
It's a nifty technique, giving you a sense of how the characters interact, and how the time passed that wasn't actually shown on the screen. It was very "real," and felt almost like a documentary technique. Imagine someone talking about their day, and while you hear their voice you see an edited series of shots showing what they did; condensing hours of footage into thirty seconds while their voice gives you a sense of who they are. It's informative and interesting, and the way director Steven Soderbergh did it, the dialogue and visuals add up to more than the sum of the parts.
Another technique used throughout the film are shots of what the Limey is thinking and remembering. These are often shots of his daughter as a child, or shots of him when he was younger, and these are edited into current events. It really conveys the sense of what Terrence Stamp is thinking and remembering about his dead daughter while he goes through the motions of investigating her death. We see shots of the young girl on a beach when he's hearing about her from people she knew as an adult, showing that he still thinks of his daughter as his little girl. Something most parents do, I've been told. When someone talks about how she seemed to like danger and bad boys, we see dad's memories about the girl seeing him after a robbery. And so on.
A nice touch to the flashbacks is that a lot of them are taken from another film, one that starred Terrence Stamp when he was a young man. I don't know how else it could have been done; he's 60ish now, and shooting a flashback of him at 30 would have required a ton of unconvincing makeup, or a great deal of suspension of disbelief by the audience. It doesn't work perfectly in
The Limey, but it's an interesting technique and works stylistically, though I thought we saw about 200% more flashback shots than we needed. Trivia says director Steven Soderbergh had to leap through a lot of hoops to get the rights to use the footage, and I think that motivated him to get his damn money's worth, and perhaps go a bit overboard in terms of how many shots of young Terrance Stamp we really needed to see.
That quibble aside, I thought the film was fun, the plot and action moved along briskly, the directorial flourishes were not heavy-handed, and I definitely enjoyed the film, as did Malaya. It wasn't anything heavy, and it's not going to provoke soul searching on your part, but it's a solid ninety minutes of entertainment, with much more intelligence than most thrillers.
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