Few directors were on a bigger hot streak from 1998 to 2001 than Steven Soderbergh. The director, who has long been known for his willingness to invent, started that run with Out of Sight, and then made Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven. Nestled in the middle of that run, though, is The Limey, a smaller, pricklier movie than any of the others on that list.
The film tells the story of an English ex-con named Wilson who comes to Los Angeles after hearing that his daughter died under mysterious circumstances. The movie’s plot is actually remarkably simple, as Wilson storms his way through Los Angeles’s criminal underworld, determined to figure out what happened. Here are five reasons the movie is worth checking out 25 years later.
The movie is reckoning with the 1960s
Although this is never part of the movie’s text, casting Stamp as the hero opposite a delightful Peter Fonda as the villain is a brilliant illumination of all the ways the revolutions of the 1960s failed. In fact, the film integrates old footage of Stamp from the 1967 film Poor Cow in order to further underline the way the past and the present are playing with one another here.
Fonda, who played a revolutionary in Easy Rider, is seen here 30 years later as a criminal leading a life of wealth. The dreams of the 1960s died, or were sold, and the film’s two principle actors show us what happened to these men of the ’60s in the decades after.
Terence Stamp’s magnetic central performance
The Limey wouldn’t work without Terence Stamp at its center playing a gruff, criminally oriented man who speaks in a cockney accent and is driven by only one thing. Stamp seems to understand Wilson’s drive to make amends almost intuitively, and he brilliantly allows the central character to be both a badass and deeply vulnerable.
Although he’s a career criminal, Wilson seems like a pretty decent person, andhe also seems to be reckoning with all of the ways he failed his daughter even as he tries to avenger her death.
It’s one of Soderbergh’s most inventive films
Steven Soderbergh is always innovating, and The Limey is one of his more formally daring projectd. The movie frequently uses asynchronous sound, playing us audio clips from scenes that have not happened yet over unrelated imagery.
This formal innovation allows the story to transcend its very straightforward framing, and leaves the viewer on edge as to when things are happening. It also reflects the headspace of its central character, a man who is reliving and regretting his past even as he tears his way through Los Angeles.
The film is still, in many ways, a conventional action movie
In spite of all of its innovation, The Limey is also a movie that climaxes with a thrilling shootout in which multiple parties go head to head, and that shootout is a reminder that Soderbergh is also a master at staging coherent, tense sequences in a more conventional style when he wants to.
In spite of a relatively modest budget, The Limey feels like a full action movie, one anchored by Wilson, a character who seems totally indifferent as to whether or not he racks up a massive body count in search of the answers he’s seeking.
It’s a rich, sad movie
Even though The Limey comes in well under two hours, it manages to pack a lot into that relatively concise 89-minute running time. It’s a thrilling neo-noir that isn’t afraid to go off the beaten path.
On top of all of that, though, the movie is also a rich examination of one man looking back on his life and feeling very little other than regret about where it’s taken him. Stamp may be at his very best in the movie’s final moments when he starts to recognize the futility of the vengeance that he has enacted, even as he realizes it was the only thing he could do.
The Limey is streaming for free on Pluto TV, Amazon, and Tubi.
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