The Limey

I would love to get into Steven Soderbergh’s head. This guy gets a fairly normal story going and then twists it into a strange conglomerate of shifting times and rapid fire editing.

Starting with one of the last lines, “Tell me about Jenny!” we get an entire back story on who Jenny (Melissa George looking radiant as always) is and why her father is looking for her without ever really going back in time for much more than a silent flashback with current conversation going over it. These aren’t really voice overs, mind you. They’re conversations that the characters are having at the time that the main character is thinking about them. Where we really are, of course, is on a plane with said main character. He’s going over the events of the past week or so in his head, and that’s how we get the information: in a stream of consciousness line of thought…kind of like this review. Except the movie makes more sense.

Wilson (Terence Stamp–Superman II, Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert and, of course, Episode I) is Jenny’s father. He’s a British ex-con who found out that his daughter has been killed in a car wreck. He doesn’t believe this, so he goes after the man she was staying with, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda). He’s a record producer in L.A. who, of course, has ties to the drug lords in California.

Wilson has some people on his side who knew Jenny. Ed (Luis Guzman–Out Of Sight, Boogie Nights, Carlito’s Way and, of course, Innocent Blood) and Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren–Clue, Victor/Victoria) were friends who didn’t really have the same questions about her death until Wilson came along.

As the events unfold we start off a little confused, but, surprisingly (to big-shot Hollywood studios), we can follow the disjointed thoughts of our hero. I love movies like this that prove Hollywood wrong.

The story is familiar, though. A man looks for the killer of his daughter. Kind of film-noirish without the woman who causes the downfall of the hero. In fact, the story is so familiar that it causes the movie to move very slowly. That’s the only real problem with the film. It’s only 90 mins. long, but it seems a little longer.

Otherwise, the performances are great and the style is awesome. Terence Stamp is cooler than ever as a Bogart-esque bad good guy who can get beat up and then go right back for more. Peter Fonda is great as a greedy producer who seems to be stuck in the 60s. In fact, we get a scene with him driving his convertible with Steppenwolf playing and telling a story about a motorcycle trip he took way back when. (By the way, there was some great music in this movie. The Hollies’ “King In Reverse” (great theme for Mr. Fonda). And any movie that starts with The Who’s “The Seeker” is alright by me.)

If you want to see where Soderbergh started down this road of non-linear editing, check out Out Of Sight. That was an awesome movie with a much better story than this one. (Although this script was just as good.) It’s also one more time that Clooney actually wanted to act.

1999 seems to be full of movies like this. Check out Fight Club, Go, and The Matrix. Ever since Pulp Fiction people can’t seem to get enough of the weird time lines that Hollywood never thought we could follow before. Now that they know we can will they start making more movies like that? I think so. Does that mean that non-editors can get jobs now? I bet it does. We’ll just be able to throw our films in a Quisenart and put them out like that. But then we might end up with Natural Born Killers. And that just won’t be good. By the way, this is my 100th review. (Yeah, the file is review101.html, but one of them never made it to the web. Maybe in the director’s cut.) Does this make me a loser? Well, that’s debatable. I think it just means that I’ve had nothing better to do than go spend money at the movies. This is why I don’t have many friends.