Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
The Limey follows Wilson, a tough English ex-con who travels to Los Angeles to avenge his daughter's death. Upon arrival, Wilson goes to task battling Valentine and an army of L.A.'s toughest criminals, hoping to find clues and piece together what happened. After surviving a near-death beating, getting thrown from a building and being chased down a dangerous mountain road, the Englishman decides to dole out some bodily harm of his own.
Steven Soderbergh's neo-noir revenge thriller is elevated well above its genre peers by audacious non-linear editing that fragments time and memory, giving familiar revenge-film mechanics a genuinely distinctive voice. Terence Stamp is magnetic — his laconic, coiled menace anchors every scene and is among his finest late-career work. The cinematography, helmed by Ed Lachman, is visually inventive: grainy archival footage from Ken Loach's 'Poor Cow' (also starring Stamp) is seamlessly woven in, creating a haunting palimpsest of the character's past. Novelty is high because the film's formal experimentation — its elliptical structure and tonal control — makes it feel singular among late-90s crime films. The plot itself is fairly conventional revenge scaffolding, and the ending, while poetic and tonally appropriate, lands quietly rather than with distinction, holding back from a fully earned resolution.