Review of Limey, The

Introduction

Steven Soderbergh, acclaimed director of Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich, made this strange movie last year, uniting 1960’s screen legends Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda. Stamp plays an ex-con cockney father who travels to America to find out the circumstances of his daughter’s mysterious death.

What is so unusual about this film is the way time is played around with: there are many flashbacks and reminiscences that Stamp has about his earlier days, when his daughter was alive. In addition, parts of Stamp’s 1967 effort, Poor Cow, have been ingeniously edited in to act as these memories his character has.

Soderbergh here continues his record of never having made a bad film: The Limey is an interesting movie and the characters are slowly developed throughout. Stamp gives a good performance of a criminal with a conscience, even though his accent is a bit ropey. Although he’s no Dick Van Dyke, he’s certainly no Michael Caine either. Also, perhaps the method of using flashbacks and the theme of memory is a bit overdone at times, but then this film is supposed to be more character-driven and intellectual than action-orientated.

Video

A fantastic anamorphic transfer is shown here, with no grain or artifacts. The many dark scenes are handled very well. This really is as clear as you can get, with every visual aspect handled flawlessly.

Audio

The 5.1 mix is well done for a movie with little low frequency effects. The dialogue is clear and the mix and soundtrack springs to life when called upon.

Features

Included in this disc are the hallmarks of any good DVD, a commentary (two in fact) and some sort of featurette. The first commentary is with director and writer, and is enthusiastic and informative – and to mirror the movie itself, it is also strangely edited together at the beginning. The second commentary is not scene-specific, but in fact plays like an audio track to a series of interviews with the cast, with mainly Stamp and Fonda chatting away. The interviews are well done, running at around 12 mins, and each begins with a chapter stop and a prologue which explains what the interviewee is talking about. The behind-the-scenes footage is just clips from the set edited together; personally I think it looks a little unprofessional, not really a featurette. But overall a very satisfying set of extras.

I would also like to add a minor gripe: it takes over a minute to actually get to the menu of the disc from insertion, after all the Channel 4 films adverts and sponsors, which cannot be skipped or fast-forwarded past (at least not on my player). This annoyed me slightly, and I thought it was worth mentioning in the faint hope that this will change in the future (not likely).

Conclusion

The Limey is a good movie, one that allows you to get inside the characters without slowing down the pace – and with the running time at 85 mins, the movie always runs along quite quickly. The only criticism I have is that the strange editing and Stamp’s cockney accent sometimes seem like gimmicks rather than having any real point to them. Perhaps these gimmicks were needed to enliven the fairly basic storyline that The Limey has. However, this is certainly a movie worth watching, especially for fans of Soderbergh’s other work.