Web posted on:
Tuesday, October 12, 1999 12:13:45 PM EST

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Steven Soderbergh's Zen-revenge fantasy, "The Limey," will be a fascinating diversion for open-minded filmgoers while infuriating just about everyone else who sees it.

Easily the oddest release from a major director in 1999, this is the kind of film in which flashbacks occur not only within scenes, but within conversations. Dialogue is sometimes delivered by characters whose mouths are clamped shut, then the banter builds toward the phrase again and we get to see them actually say it.

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Theatrical preview for "The Limey" Windows Media 28K 80K

On the surface, the main character, a cockney ex-convict named Wilson (played with over-pronounced, steely magnetism by Terence Stamp), has come to Los Angeles to avenge the death of his beautiful, high-living daughter. But what Wilson's really doing up in the Hollywood Hills is. That's not a mistake; it's up to you to complete the sentence after you see the film.

Soderbergh is satirically vague about what's going on; he's like a philosopher who constantly pokes you in the ribs.

Nothing explicable happens for so long, and in so many different ways, that you eventually have no choice but to start regarding the nothing as something. The credit sequence proceeds to the tune of The Who's "The Seeker," and Pete Townshend's characteristically dated lyrics can be read as a clue to what we're about to watch. Maybe.

The answer to "Why are we here?" is laced with confusing ironies when the kids who did the seeking all those years ago have turned into murderous (although laid-back) old men.

Today's audiences may only recognize him from "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994), but Stamp was a pretty big movie star back in the hedonistic '60s. He and his "Limey" co-star, Peter Fonda, are iconoclastic embodiments of a time when people went out of their way to try to answer existential questions that no one could properly phrase.

Of course, it's a lot easier to "seek the truth" on a daily basis when you're filthy rich and sleeping with every cute little denim-clad thing that wiggles your way. That may well be what's going on in "The Limey" -- Soderbergh's letting all those hollow existentialists take a well-deserved hit right between the eyes.

But Stamp's Wilson is no Charles Manson; his victims are paying for an actual sin. Fonda plays Terry Valentine, a millionaire record producer who was quick enough to package all those good vibrations and sell them to anyone with a buck. So now he views the world in pastel shades. Valentine's got a gorgeous house with a view of the Pacific Ocean and a pool that juts over the edge of a cliff. He sleeps with the requisite slinky model-type who's probably one-third his age.

Unfortunately, his former squeeze was Wilson's daughter, and she had to be silenced when she caught wind of a drug deal he was mixed up in. Again, though, you don't really know that for sure.

Wilson is utterly convinced of Valentine's guilt, and the audience just has to ride along as he stalks through L.A. like the angel of death, snuffing anyone who stands in the way of his ultimate goal. Namely, killing Valentine.

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The single-mindedness of his pursuit immediately calls to mind Lee Marvin's character in John Boorman's "Point Blank" (1967). That film recently was "re-made" as Mel Gibson's "Payback," but Soderbergh's humor isn't as broad as Gibson likes to get. Wilson doesn't whoop it up like The Three Stooges' Curly. The wit lies in his grim aplomb.

The best scene is one in which Wilson gets the hell beaten out of him by four toughs at a warehouse where his daughter was last seen alive. They pound and kick him nearly unconscious, then toss him out on the street and threaten to kill him if he's stupid enough to come back later.

So he doesn't come back later. He comes back right then. Moments after the door closes, he reaches into the waist of his pants, pulls out a revolver, and stumbles back into the warehouse. All we see are muzzle flashes through the doorway as the shots echo through the building. Something sardonic is going on here; Stamp is playing a vigilante by way of Wile E. Coyote.

Scenes are loaded with self-references, or at least references to the real 1960s as they relate to Soderbergh's '60s demystification. Fonda talks about riding motorcycles way back then -- see "Easy Rider" (1969) -- and flashbacks to Wilson's younger days are scenes that Soderbergh co-opted from one of Stamp's first films, a Ken Loach-directed story called "Poor Cow" (1967).

The most obvious precursors to "The Limey," though, are the films of a cult director named Monte Hellman. He used to make films just like this, in which nothing happens as a sort of metaphor for whatever you care to bring into the theater. The best of his films, like "The Shooting" (1967, starring the then-little-known Jack Nicholson) and "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971), vary between vague wandering and mad careening, depending on the director's mood. And when it's all done, you can't describe what you saw.

Happily, Soderbergh has dispensed with Hellman's counterculture pretensions and just wings a funny, violent story at us. The biggest joke is that his dispensable stuff is more interesting than some of the films that other directors labor over and promote relentlessly.

Fans of Soderbergh's last film, 1998's brilliant and far more commercial "Out of Sight," should lower their expectations when seeing "The Limey." But that doesn't mean they should leave their thinking caps at home.

"The Limey" is definitely not for everybody. Going nowhere fast, it often seems like the story could have (or should have) been wrapped up in 20 minutes. The real pleasure lies in its cockeyed ambience. There's bad language, several shootings -- including a bizarre sequence in which Fonda is "killed" three times in quick succession before Stamp even attempts to shoot him -- and a couple of old-fashioned beatings. Nutty beyond words. Rated R. 90 minutes.