Real Men Love The Limey

This is a very simple story.  It's the story of Wilson, an ex-thief from Britain who spent the better part of his life behind bars while his family grew up and moved on.  During his most recent stretch, he received a letter and a newspaper clipping telling him that his daughter had been killed in a firey car crash.  In disbelief, he flies to America upon his release to find the man who sent the letter, Luis Guzman, and his daughter's boyfriend, famous music promoter Terry Valentine.  The Limey ensues.

 

Zero Wasted Time

Maybe the manliest thing about this movie is that it clocks in at a smooth, punchy eighty-five minutes.  But you don't feel shortchanged at all.  The characters are decisive, as exemplified by the above picture of Wilson slamming a man's head into his desk, and Director Steven Soderbergh nimbly navigates conversations and situations, deftly layering them and condensing entire conversations -- or series of conversations -- into a handful of lines and exchanged facial expressions and body language from a talented but mostly overlooked cast.  A couple examples of the tidy cinematic shorthand that give this simple story an ecomonic depth with a flurry of subtle novelistic touches:

• A poster on one character's wall lets us know that she was once the star of a TNT movie.  She is now a voice coach. 

• While having a look around Valentine's house, Wilson manages a brief smirk at Valentine's collection of kama sutra statuettes.

 

Silent Scheming

Wilson is a constant schemer.  His schemes are what put him in prison -- no less than three separate stretches -- in the first place, and now that he's out, and has a mission, there is nothing restricting him from sitting around, smoking and thinking at any free moment.  And Soderbergh lets us know that this is exactly what's happening by splicing brief shots of it in between the investigatory conversations he has with the people who were once part of his daughter's life.  It lets you know that he's going to get to the bottom of this matter, and his face is going to be almost expressionless when he gets there. 

 

Excessive Limey Slang

Throughout the movie, Wilson's dialogue is awash in the slang of a man who's spent most of his life locked up in a British prison.  He generally winds up explaining himself to whoever he's talking to and, by extension, to us. 

At one point, Wilson finds himself in the custody of the police.  He stands up and delivers a machine-gun monologue so peppered with British colloquialisms it's practically Dutch.  After he's done, the cop interviewing him calmly interjects,"There is one thing I don't understand.  The thing I don't understand is every motherfucking word you're saying."

Well played, copper.

 

Absurdly Realistic Flashback Sequences

Who is that playing the young Limey?  Well, it's the young Terrence Stamp, of course.  Soderbergh re-appropriated footage from the 1967 film Poor Cow -- in which Stamp plays a thief who is caught and sent to prison -- for use in The Limey's flashbacks, and the effect is striking to anyone who's seen the movie.

 

Luis Guzman

Luis Guzman is one of the manliest actors of all time.  He's kind of like an ugly Puerto Rican Sean Connery.  The reason I say that is fairly simple:  he's in a wide variety of movies, some of which are great (Traffic, Boogie Nights), some of which are terrible (Pluto Nash, School for Scoundrels), but all of which contain Luis Guzman playing... Luis Guzman.  I am definitely not saying that Luis Guzman isn't a great actor.  He's one of my favorites.  But never have you seen a movie containing Luis Guzman and, later, while scanning the imdb entry for that movie, turned to your Today Girlfriend (TGF -- patent pending) and said, "Wow, I didn't recognize Luis Guzman!"  He does not have a face or a voice that lends itself well to disguise.  Or maybe you just can't mask awesome.

 

Instant Karma

Within the first ten minutes of the movie, Wilson is able to locate and break into the warehouse through which Valentine's suspected shady dealings have been filtering.  He correctly identifies a man at a desk as the man in charge and then assaults him for information on Valentine's whereabouts.  Of course, the rest of the goons in the warehouse come running to the scene, take Wilson's gun, beat the shit out of him and throw him out on the street whereupon they taunt him roundly while walking away.  Before they even get back inside the warehouse, Wilson pulls his second gun out of the back of his pants and walks in afterward.  The camera doesn't follow him, and all we see and hear is flashes and gunshots.  The youngest of the goons runs out of the building with a look of sheer terror on his face, and Wilson proudly speedwalks out the door after him and toward the camera.

He stops and yells: 

 

"Tell Him I'm Fucking Coming!"

If I were "him," I'd be worried.  That's one intense revenger. 

 

Ironic Casting of Peter Fonda

Peter Fonda is best known for his role as "Captain America," the motorcycling free spirit and occasional coke dealer in Easy Rider.  In that movie, he's the essence or embodiment of 60s exploration and experimentation.  In The Limey, he's Terry Valentine, the man who capitalized on that era's music and has been riding that wave/giant cliff-hanging mansion ever since.  While Valentine was at one time in the midst of that cultural explosion, he is now content to coast on his past exploitation of it.  Sound familiar, Mr. Fonda?

 

"The first Christopher Cross album?  Changed my life."

At the party, a random fan approaches Valentine to tell him all about the impact of Christopher Cross on his sad, sad life.  Apart from being outstanding, there's really no reason for this scene to be in the movie, but anybody who thinks you shouldn't take every available opportunity to make fun of Christopher Cross fans is either a woman living in 1970 or is Christopher Cross himself (and, thus, is also a woman living in 1970).

 

Background Murder

There may be no more darkly hilarious scene ever in the history of movies than the one in which, in the middle of a party, Wilson headbutts one of Valentine's bodyguards and throws him over a railing entirely in the background of a shot.  "What's that sound?" Valentine thinks to himself.  "It sounds kind of like... murder."

 

This Guy

This movie is pretty much full of people who have never been in anything even remotely as good before or since.  This guy, whose name happens to be Nicky Katt, is not one of those people, but that didn't keep me from not remembering in any of the good movies (School of Rock, both Grindhouse movies, Sin City) that he's been in.  For some reason, I even thought he was in Melrose Place, which, if true, probably would have nullified the rest of the manliness of the movie.  As it stands, though, Katt's Stacy the Hitman character is a freight train of hilarious, rapid fire misogyny.  "What's the smartest thing that ever came out of a woman's mouth?" he asks.  "Einstein's cock."

Consider yourself burned, all women. 

 

Badge Thievery

After Valentine's security man puts a price on Wilson's head, and the hit goes wrong, Wilson finds himself in the custody of the police, who try to extract any information from Wilson they can find.  Amidst mutual suspicion, the cop and Wilson ask each other sideways questions before finally coming to the conclusion that the other man is more or less on the right team.  Upon conclusion of the questioning, as Wilson is free to go, he awkwardly stands up, fumbles around in his pocket, produces a badge which he had swiped while under detention, and leaves.  That Limey has enormous balls.

 

There's Gonna Be a Showdown.

When Wilson learns the location of Valentine's secret cabin, the scene is set for a crazy siege scenario.  However, since seiges are generally extremely long and boring, and this movie is energetic and short, the screenwriter had the good sense to throw the assassins into the mix.  Though they missed their mark the first time, they hatch a scheme to tail Valentine to his cabin where, ostensibly, they'll take out Wilson, Valentine and Valentine's men and abscond with whatever loot they think Wilson's come to collect.  The problem is, Wilson is only there for his own personal satisfaction, and he can be a patient man when the situation calls for it.  So he let's them scuffle, and a gunfight ensues. 

 

This Is What Satisfaction Looks Like

I'm not going to tell you how what happens in the movie's climactic scene, and I'm not going to tell you how everything turns out.  But the above picture should pretty well suffice. 

 

P.S. This Chick

I almost forgot.