The Limey

Synopsis: English ex-con Wilson (Terence Stamp) travels to Los Angeles to investigate the death of his daughter. He learns of her affair with wealthy record producer Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda). Convinced her allegedly accidental death is directly linked to Valentine, Wilson seeks his revenge.

Although the publicity spruiks The Limey as being by Academy Award winning director, Steven Soderbergh, it was made before either Erin Brockovich or Traffic and would have gone straight to video but for those successes.

The Limey is an odd film, not because it is intentionally quirky, but because it is, how can one put it? Distant? Detached? Neutral? That is, although it adheres to the format of the revenge thriller, it treats the conventional progression of violence as the protagonist works his way from lowly hirelings to The Man, in an intentionally offhand, if not downright perfunctory, way.

Soderbergh knows that you've seen it all before, most effectively in John Boorman's genre benchmark Point Blank and it seems he decided to put a different spin on the template. Terence Stamp's Wilson is an evident counterpoint to Lee Marvin's Walker. Both characters are obsessively bent on their goal, but where Walker had concentrated his revengeful desire into a cash equivalent, Wilson is burning with a need, not to know, but to get as close as he can to his irretrievable loss. Unlike Point Blank, Soderburgh's film has humanistic inclinations that moves it outside the strictly generic formula.

And that in a way is its weakness as it ends up neither fish nor fowl. As a film about redemption it is not like, say The Crossing Guard, in which Jack Nicholson is similarly bent on avenging a lost daughter, for the angst of that theme is dissipated by the gun-play and car crashes and the human connection submerged in the conventional action. And yet these latter are handled in such a throwaway manner as to be near spoofing of the genre.

The casting of Peter Fonda, as the hippy era rock promoter turned record producer and general dirt bag was a wonderful stroke and Terence Stamp does a creditable job as the aging ex-con Limey (a reference to his origins in Limehouse, one of South London's lower class dockside suburbs), although he never really convinces as a heavyweight and too much was made of his accent. (The film also cleverly interpellates footage from Ken Loach's Poor Cow of Stamp, a '60s pin-up, in his younger days. And there's a nifty soundtrack of '60s music.)

To use an artistic comparison, though you can appreciate the overall message of The Limey, it is a study rather than a finished painting and whilst there is evidently a skilled hand at work, the composition is too loose to be truly effective.

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