The Limey

Terrence Stamp gives a terrific performance in this film. Even before we learn that he is an English ex-convict out to find out who murdered his daughter and exact a terrible revenge of some sort, we already know the general tenor of his intentions from his face. The set of his jaw, the tilt of his brow, and especially the cold shock coming from his eyes all establish his character better than hours of exposition ever could. When he speaks, you're compelled to listen; when he does things, even ferocious and antisocial things, all you can do is marvel. He is manly and composed and utterly magnetic.

It's too bad the rest of the movie seems designed to undermine him. The plot is basically a standard one: Stamp comes to Los Angeles to find out who to kill to get satisfaction for his daughter's death, and then kill him. But the director, Steven Soderbergh, has taken it into his mind to inject innumerable notes of sentimentality into the whole enterprise. Although this is not standard operating procedure, it does not necessarily spell doom for the film, either. Soderbergh's previous film, "Out of Sight," had similar intentions and achieved them admirably. Furthermore, Soderbergh borrows another technique from "Out of Sight" and goes backward and forward in time almost constantly.

In "Out of Sight," these techniques were completely successful. So Soderbergh apparently has decided that he can use them even more than he did in that film. The result is anarchy. The time-jumping, used to especially grating effect to jump between locations and times in conversations between the same two people, alternately jars and confuses, especially when it means that a character is talking but their mouth, presumably shot at a different point in the conversation, is not moving. Sometimes he uses shots from outside the conversation to similarly useless effect. There are about forty million shots of Stamp on an airplane, spliced into basically unrelated scenes. Is he coming to LA? Is he going? What does it mean? At some point, no one cares.

The notes of sentimentality are handled in a similarly ham-fisted way. Flashbacks do most of the work, in grainy color or black-and-white, and again shoved into the middle of conversations between two people in the here and now. The flashbacks turn what could have been psychologically revealing moments when Stamp lets his totally fearsome guard down into honeyed, trite memories. Given Stamp's talent and the ineffectiveness of the flashbacks, it would have been better just to let the man talk.

The cloying sentiment also further confuses the tone of a movie whose tone is confused to begin with. There's the lethal Stamp going about his business in a manner well-suited to a crime drama or action film. There's also the above-mentioned tenderness. There are some fish-out-of-water jokes about Stamp not understanding LA and people in LA not understanding Stamp which pop up intermittently and don't go anywhere and aren't funny. There are some vague feints at social satire which are funny but which are left similarly undeveloped. And finally, there's an implied romance, or at least an implied development of a friendship, between Stamp and his daughter's former acting teacher which is presented as an accomplished fact without any justification for it.

Shoehorn that much stuff into a movie, and annoy the viewer endlessly with jittery temporal shifts, and you're not going to have much time for the actual plot. And, indeed, not much plot ever occurs. There's an awful lot of talking about the plot and why the plot is happening, but actual actions taken by the characters are very few. What we have, in short, is a mess, one of the longest-seeming 90-minute movies in recent memory. Even with a Stamp on it, someone should return "The Limey" to sender.

My godfather Mark gave me some good criticism on how this one was written. Basically, the problem was that I had developed a style well suited to reviewing action movies and comedies that had no idea what to do with this movie, and I was casting about stylistically, as you can see above. I got better, but I thank Mark for helping me to do that.

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