THE Limey” has cult film written all over it.Wistfully moody, stylized and exquisitely self-conscious, it’s filled with 1960s movie references and makes maximum use of the iconic status of two stars from that era: Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda.
It’s clever, cool fun and it looks great. But it doesn’t work nearly as well as “Out of Sight,” Steven Soderbergh’s terrific last movie, which also used lots of jump cuts and flashbacks.
It’s a much smaller, slower, arty piece of work that veers between taking itself seriously as a revenge thriller and playing the story for laughs as a collection of jokey genre references.
Wilson (Stamp) is a tough, Cockney-speaking English career criminal who has been released from prison after the death of his daughter Jenny in L.A. He crosses the Atlantic to investigate what he believes was her murder.
First he enlists Ed (Luiz Guzman), a Mexican-American cook who was a friend of his daughter, and then Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), who was her acting teacher. With their help, he discovers that Jenny had been seeing Valentine (Peter Fonda), a wealthy record producer with a sideline in drugs. Despite receiving a severe beating in the course of his investigation, Wilson decides to exact revenge for his daughter’s death.
The weakest thing about “The Limey” is a script by Lem Dobbs that reaches for laconic simplicity but comes off as underwritten, prone to the odd clich and occasionally crude.
The great Stamp doesn’t act much. And sometimes when he delivers his lines, he looks like he’s repeating something someone just whispered in his ear. But, like Fonda, he just exudes presence.