The Limey

Rating:
Summary: SLOW PACED, AND WHAT IS THE POINT?
Review: One could be forgiven for expecting great things of this movie. After all with Steven Soderbergh directing, the man behind OUT OF SIGHT, ERIN BROCKOVICH and TRAFFIC, you immediately imagine you are going to be watching another masterpiece from this hugely talented film maker. Sadly, THE LIMEY is a huge disappointment. Terence Stamp is excellent,and being a sucker for revenge movies I thought this would blow me away, but the film moves at such a sluggish pace and there seems to be no point to it. If you want a good revenge movie check out POINT BLANK. Vincent Price's THEATER OF BLOOD is another good one, though in a completely different genre. But avoid THE LIMEY...

Rating:
Summary: A superbly crafted film!
Review: One of the biggest surprises in '99, this superbly crafted film was majorly overlooked. The plot is a conventional one but shot and edited brilliantly by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay by Lem Dobbs.

It follows an english ex-con named Wilson (played wonderfully by Terence Stamp) and his quest for vengeance for the murder of his daughter. Soderbergh and Dobbs' commentary on the DVD is worth the price.. they give an amazing insight into the situations and the overall editing style that makes this movie so interesting to watch.

This movie also features a very oddball but amusing cast of supporting actors like Peter Fonda, Leslie Ann Warren and Luis Guzman.

Another real interesting note about this movie is how they convinced director Ken Loach to lend them footage from an older film showing a younger Terence Stamp, to integrate with Wilson's ongoing character development.

Like modern noir-ish classics like Memento and Insomnia (the original version), The Limey is both entertaining and thought provoking and keeps the audience within it's reach.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing Conclusion to Fabulous Movie.
Review: First of all, I'll say that I found the climax of the film a bit of a let-down. Oh, it was clever, but not in a particularly believable way, it was all a bit convenient the way people kept turning up. But never mind; the build-up was so flawless, Soderberg's direction so stylish, and the central performances so convincing, that it's really barely worth grumbling. The editing was mainly to thank for the effective increase in tension. Scenes from all over the time line of the story were spliced together with no explanation as to where they fit in. This could be potentially irritating and confusing, but Soderberg proves, as he did again with Traffic, that he is fully capable of keeping track of different aspects of the same story through colour and light. So the story flashes backwards several years and forwards several days without disrupting the narrative flow.
Peter Fonda and Luiz Guzman are both very good, but the film belongs completely to Terrence Stamp. He keeps the audience hanging off of his every ground out word, and his face, even, or rather especially in repose has endless emotion lingering in it. Best of all, the flashbacks are actually scenes from a film much earlier in Stamp's career, so while the young man does not particularly resemble the older one, the patterns of speech and the movements of the face are the same. This, like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is a classic Terrence Stamp performance, and the film is a credit to both him and Soderberg.

Rating:
Summary: SOOOO Disappointing
Review: Unfortunately, this film [is bad]. T. Stamp has a completely whack accent, especially for a Brit. (Imagine Harison Ford as an aging gang-banger from the Bronx.) S. Soderburgh hits all the sour notes. I can't imagine what any of these people were thinking. Great talents are wasted in this film. Do yourself a favor, watch it on cable.

Rating:
Summary: Good for all the right reasons--its not a movie; it's a film
Review: I hate the idea, arrogantly enough, of people liking a great piece of art for all of the wrong reasons. Some I have heard have gone so far left field with metaphors about the title character of this film that they have even found a way to take the inexorable rage and focus of Terence Stamp's character in this movie completely out of the actual context of the film to make him a poster boy for the Conservative Right--an often ironically apt analogy, again, for all the wrong reasons.

What makes this film so great is the integrity of Soderberg to his central character and his unique and artistic relationship to the plot. He makes his style subserivent to the story in such a way as to create the artistic paradox that says he has done the exact opposite; the marriage of the two is perfect. Terence Stamp (who is brilliant in this by the way) is a "Limey" on a juggernaut's course of revenge for the man he holds responsible for the death of his only child, a grown daughter, in Los Angeles. Peter Fonda (who is not quite as good as Stamp but does get out of his character's way at moments that are beautifully real) plays one of the many archetypal Baby-Boomer roles in existence today: an insecure, narcississtic and weak playboy/Recording Executive with a drug problem and predilection for impressionable young girls. One of these girls in his past may have been the Limey's inexplicably dead daughter. These two men are separated by an entire world--an Atlantic Ocean in one sense, and seemingly antithetical cultures on another--with many people of all walks of life (and levels of both beauty and depravity) in between. It is the painful, mysterious death of a young woman in the vicinity of one of these men that links the two of them, and is the genesis of one man's mission against the other.

But that plot is merely the icing on the cake of this movie. It is nowhere near as powerful or as important as the theme, which could only be fully experienced by an observer (us, the audience) via the heart of the main character (the "Limey" himself). This is where Soderberg's style transcends the boundaries of simple ability and approaches genius. Through the majestic techniique of breaking the time line with numerous off kilter frames of both foreshadowing and reminiscence (and you can't tell which is which or what is even real until the end ties them all up) the theme becomes prfoundly real and, with each frame, more obvious. The Limey is on the same mission he has been on virtually all of his life. He is not running toward something; he is running from himself, using the easily understandable motives behind the new thing he is coincidentally running toward as the newest and boldest version of an excuse.

Musings and abstractions on the wordly significance of the Limey's character in the context of his personal mission are pointless and become fairly infantile without taking this, the theme, into consideration. The "Limey" is not chasing after the devil to stare him in the eye and kill him; his soul has for the most part already been sold. He is chasing a false hope that the contract for his soul, already signed in his own blood on the dotted line, either does not really exist in his personal hell or can be bought back with the weak appearance of a vengeful but essentially good deed. And like every person, the irony of running away from oneself--regardless of the inner demons you're trying to escape--is that you eventually run even faster into that one and only aspect of yourself headlong.

Hell: there is no way out...but through.

The Limey has more in common with Mickey Roarke's character in ANGEL HEART than with any hero.

Terence Stamp's performance is brilliant because he makes you, like all great actors, like his character as much as he does, regardless of its above-listed failings or bad deeds. But again, that's because Stamp does such a good job at this role, not because his character, though forgiveable, is all that likeable as a person. Al Pacino did an equally great job in both THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE and SCARFACE a few years ago, but I don't see myself emulating his characters by becoming a devil-worshipping drug dealer and moving to Havana because of it. Only a child could look at THE LIMEY and call both the main character's inner pain-inspired character failings and the gradual unfolding of their obvious destructive consequences something other than what they are--and only a deeply fearful and probably formally abused child raised on too many action movies at that.

This movie is no masterpiece, but it is full of depth, with layers that bloom to reveal themselves with each passing frame. It is very good, and you will be surprised at the existential questions its simple answers ask of you, while still being entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: The Worst Acting - The Worst Directing - The Worst Movie
Review: Alright I am going to make this very quick. This movie is absolutly horrible. I normally dont take the time to write the reviews, but I had to let someone know. Although the actors and directors are both good they do not pull it off at all. The script is riduculus and the plot is a joke. Whatever you do never ever ever even think about this movie. I feel like the buck I spent renting it was the biggest waste of money ever. I would have had a much better time throwing the money in the trash. Oh yea the ending of this film horrible. Okay well there is one way someone could justify buying this movie - If they needed something to burn to keep warm at night. Actually as much as this movie bites I dont even think that would work! If anyone agrees please write and say so. Movies like this should not be on the self - they should be in the trash.

P.S. - Peter Fonda stains his Easy Rider legacy with this film

Rating:
Summary: hit him again
Review: The first, and more obvious, reason to consider this a conservative film is that the basic plot structure is built around the notion that if you plop a
principled man--the limey and ex-con, Wilson (Terrence Stamp)--down in the midst of unprincipled men--drug-dealing Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda)
and his henchmen--it is the man of principle who is most dangerous because he will keep moving forward inexorably until his principles are
vindicated. Admittedly, the values that Wilson adheres to may not be right out of the classic Judeo-Christian playbook, but he does nonetheless have
a strict and uncompromising set of rules that govern his life, among which are the necessity to wreak vengeance on the men who killed his daughter.
Meanwhile, for Valentine and company, there are no behavioral standards, no morals to be followed; all is negotiable and nothing else matters but
your own survival. It is a sad commentary on the state of American culture that the filmmakers felt it necessary to make Wilson so overtly alien (not
just British, which we fawningly associate with higher standards in all things, but lower-class British so that his accent and vocabulary make him
even more of a fish out of water). When a DEA agent says to Wilson, "You're not from around here, are you?", he is presumably referring not just to
his national origin but also to how different he is from the laid-back Californians amongst whom he's now operating. Wilson's savage morality is
sadly just as foreign to us as is his Cockney slang.

The other aspect of the movie that makes it particularly conservative is the way in which Peter Fonda's character references the character he played in
Easy Rider (1969). Stamp is clearly supposed to be portraying an older version of the character he played in Poor Cow (1967), to the point where
director Soderbergh even uses film clips from that earlier role. But not many of us will ever have seen that film. Easy Rider, on the other hand, is a
touchstone of 60s culture and a key to understanding the era. Fonda and Dennis Hopper are counterculture antiheroes, riding around on their
motorcycles in search of America. Along the way they find drugs, hippies, mimes, Jack Nicholson, cops, etc. And in the famous ending of the film
America finally catches up to them, as a pickup full of rednecks shotguns Fonda and Hopper right off of their bikes. In many ways the finale drew a
line across the culture, and whether you rooted for the bikers or the truckers defined which side of the line you were on. As the 1968 election and
1972 re-election of the loathsome but "law-and-order" Richard Nixon demonstrated to the Left's chagrin, most of us were rooting for the guys with
shotguns.

Since Fonda's character presumably died at the end of Easy Rider, he's not explicitly playing the same character in The Limey. But it's easy to
imagine that this is what that biker (like so many of his generation) would have turned into--ammoral, self-absorbed, faux spiritual, cashing in on
both the music of the 60s (he's a record producer) and the drugs (gone is any pretense that they'll bring enlightenment; they're just easy money). As
Fonda preens around the screen with his fake tan, his over white teeth, and his vapid young girlfriend; moving between his ostentatious LA canyon
home and his Big Sur bungalow; mouthing inanities about the meaning of the 60s; any conservative who's worth his salt will be salivating at the
prospect of watching him get whacked again.

Rating:
Summary: Style Chosen Over Content
Review: Terence Stamp is a very appealing actor with a presence unlike any other. The first time I ever saw him was in a 1969 Poe film directed by Fellini called "Toby Dammit"(Spirits of the Dead). Since then I have seen him in various European films but one of his best performances was in an early eighties Stephen Frears movie The Hit where he played a gangster hiding in Spain and John Hurt was the assassin sent to find him (and a very young Tim Roth as assassins apprentice). Soderbergh's The Limey is reminiscent of that movie in that both make use of Stamps mysterious almost otherworldy nature. I like some things about The Limey like the opening number with Who playing The Seeker while Wilson(Stamps character)leaves the airport & I like Valentines(Fonda) mansion. Both these characters(and the actors that play them) are relics of the sixties and so there is a strong nostalgia thing going on. Soderbergh lays it on too thick though. The passages where we glimpse Wilson in flashback have been praised by some but I don't think the use of the old Stamp film Poor Cow adds any content to the film. It just looks like a home movie and apparently Soderbergh likes that, the look of it I fear is good enough for Soderbergh. Stamps character is looking back at a life wasted but its just so vague, those glimpses into his past are just people at parties smiling and laughing and being young. The flash forwards are kind of annoying and once again it seems style is Soderberghs motivation and his driving rationale. Stamp never becomes more than an image, a visual for the camera to play tricks with. The story is good or could have been good but the constant time shuffling and all the busy visuals prove just to distract from what we really want, some content. At the end I didn't feel like I really knew Wilson any better than I did in the beginning. Stamp remains a kind of ghost whose only interaction with the present tense is through moments of violence. Fondas character is also just a visual, never really flushed out. His characters roots are in the music business of the sixties and he attaches himself to young girls supposedly to remain eternally young. But he's also supposed to be running a major smuggling ring. His character just doesn't seem to have it in him. I think Soderbergh spent far too much time establishing a visual dossier for his characters and far too little on their actual substance. Tarantino is much better at finding a balance between striking visuals and character content. Tarantino is a writer first and a visual stylist second. Soderbergh would do better with less style and more script.

Rating:
Summary: Terrence Stamp is AMAZING!
Review: First things first: Without Terrence Stamp, The Limey wouldn't have really been as enjoyable. He manages to convey a sense of barely controlled rage and menace as Wilson, a small-time career theif, who has been in & out of prison since his teens. He's just been released from a 9-Year stretch (For robbing the Box-Office at a Pink Floyd concert....), and he's in L.A., looking for the man he holds responsible for the death of his Daughter (The LOVELY Melissa George, who manages to be likeable even though she has no dialogue and appears only in flashback....). Peter Fonda is likewise excellent as Terry Valentine, a sleazy, mobbed-up Record Exec.; The movie relentlessly builds to the inevetable confrontation between the two, and director Soderbergh & Writer Lem Dobbs throw in some great incidental characters along the way, played by wonderful character actors, such as Luis Guzman, Nicky Katt, and Bill Duke.

I subtracted a few stars because I really didn't care for the ending, but the magnificent performance by Stamp, as an aging hood who spews out Cockney Rhyming-Slang, makes the film....How did he not get an Oscar for this part? Props to Soderbergh for using footage from "Poor Cow" as flashbacks for Stamp's character. The disc has some cool extras, and crime flick fans will find a LOT to enjoy in this film.

Rating:
Summary: Soderbergh goes beyonde himself
Review: Steven Soderbergh is known as an director to whom everythings counts. He always keeps up with the details. He uses many tecnical resourses in lightning, editing, in the score and the most from actors in order to achieve a higher level from all his movies .Actors like George Clooney --'Out of Sight' and 'Ocean's Eleven' -- and Julia Roberts -- 'Erin Brockovich' and 'Ocean's Eleven'-- have done their best job with him. But in 'The Limey' he has gone one step further what he'd done before. Not only does he get amazing peformances from Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda, but he also makes of editing and lightning real characters in this film.

Telling the story of a father, Wilson, who wants to revenge the mysterious death of his daughter and comes accross a music producer, who is the girl's ex-boyfriend, sounds rather like an excuse for Soderbergh experiment in collors and cuts -- something that he used very often in his previous works and he would eventually use much more in the later movie 'Traffic'. Moreover, he uses footage from the 1967 film 'Poor Cow', which also feautured Stamp. It is at least strange to imagine that something shot 30 years earlier would be useful and fitting. I think only Soderbergh's genius mind would think of such a thing. And the result is much better than any make or computer work.

Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda --two icons of the '60s -- are at least impressive playing the main roles. Their 'confrontation' is breath taking. The supporting cast also very effective. Luiz Guzmán -- a Soderbergh 's favourite -- and Lesley Ann Warren play former friends of Wilson's daugther.

Lem Dobbs 's script along with the direction make the film very French New Wave, but with a touch of the thrillers from the '60s and '70s, like 'Point Blank'. The soudtrack also fits the movie. Pay attention to the song played in the opening credits: The Who's "The Seeker"; there couldn't be a music more perfect for Wilson.

Definetely this quiet character-driven movie is not for everyone. People who know Soderbergh's work only from crowd-pleaser like 'Erin Brockovich' may feel very uncorfortable watching this movie. But, by the way, this IS a film to make everybody unconfortable: it tackles moral issues, like revenge and guilt. That, as everybody knows, are not pieces of cake.