Critics reviews

The film is shaped like John Boorman’s Point Blank, structured around an elemental case of paternal vengeance and crammed with Soderberghian texture and comedy. But it’s first and foremost a celebration of Stamp, whose incisive intelligence and no-fucks-given momentum through the plot is a welcome spectacle.

[It's] a brain-teaser, at times flirting with midnight movie stoner pretension, that somehow keeps both its storyline and its emotions clear, and that also happens to fulfill the requirements of the revenge thriller, as well as the more rarefied genre of melodrama in which old men look back on life and take responsibility for their failures.

The first shot is as striking as any Steven Soderbergh ever forged. A hundred no less snazzy follow it... In times of mindless postmodernism, Soderbergh distinguishes between the reductive appropriation of an era (stunt casting, or a Che Guevara shirt, say) and the tenderly analytical embodying of it... This is assuredly Soderbergh's masterpiece -- the ache of missed chances and bad choices, the loneliness of vengeance, the search for true emotion in an ocean of ruthless fragmentation.

There's a rawness, something naked, about shunting to older footage of Stamp. It suggests a memory, and more generally a past, so cherished that it breaks out with hyperlucid photographic precision, with a leap in time actually traced across film and life. Wilson says he wants "satisfaction," echoing the old duelling challenge—so real it hurts, and so deeply that it becomes real.

Of the films which post-date Schizopolis my favourite is The Limey... These ultimately dystopic scenes prevent The Limey from being a fun, ‘boy's own' crime story in the vein of Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) or Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000). Rather, it acts like a melancholic dissertation on the nature of loss when it affects even the morally reprehensible.

Though immensely satisfying on strict genre terms, The Limey edges into a sad, rueful tone that not only lends poignancy to Stamp's quest to know more about his estranged daughter, but also to its stars' ebbing careers... The Limey is a throwback to a great period in American cinema, one in which Soderbergh himself would have fit quite nicely.

Its stroke-of-genius pairing of two '60s icons aside, "The Limey" is essentially a down-to-earth crime thriller that's cut like an art film. The story is told out of sequence, but there's an inherent logic to it. Conversations are re-created and reconstituted; they often resemble memories of conversations rather than real ones. The effect is riveting as well as surprisingly realistic.

With its montage of flashbacks and flashforwards, images as much from imagination as from memory, The Limey is almost a story that never happened, a fantasy briefly dreamed by airline passenger Wilson, perhaps on his way to Los Angeles, perhaps not.

Funny, touching, and as effortlessly assured, in its own relatively low budget way, as Out of Sight, this consistently imaginative, comic crime movie milks the fish-out-of-water theme for all it is worth, and then some... Lem Dobbs' script is witty; Ed Lachman's images and Cliff Martinez' music are perfectly in keeping with the light, relaxed mood; and Soderbergh's customary playfulness with the narrative deftly underlines Stamp's obsession. A joy.

The complex play with time, the metaphysical ambiguity, the stylish wit and violence, and the cool sense of LA architecture all evoke [Point Blank]. For that matter, a lot of flashback material about the hero as a young man comes straight out of Ken Loach's 1967 Poor Cow. But with or without a sense of where it all comes from, this is a highly enjoyable and offbeat thriller--better to my taste than Soderbergh's Out of Sight, though similarly quirky in how it sets about telling a story.

To the English ear Wilson sounds like a cut-rate parody of Dickens ("'Oo dunnit, then? 'Oo snuffed 'er?"), but Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Lem Dobbs, use the argot to establish Wilson as an alien, a stranger who observes L.A. with uncomprehending suspicion, while it returns the favor... Smart, funny and soulful though The Limey is, if that's all of "the '60s" that remains in current memory, then, as Wilson might say, it's a poor do.

Danny Saber is behind most of the film's hollowed-out jazz-tronica. But it's Soderbergh's Visine-clear vision and unconventional skill at killing several narrative birds with a single stylistic stone that elevates a relatively simple noir flick into an ingeniously atavistic work of art, in which even the editing is a slave to the rhythm. All this, despite the fact that Soderbergh is after two divergent film moments from the '60s.