Opens October 8, 1999

Steven Soderbergh was onto a very good thing with last year's edgy crime drama Out of Sight., so it's no small wonder that he has leapt feet first into the genre once again. His newest venture The Limey is a more experimental, more ponderous film, exploring the similar arena of the small time revenge thriller. While Out of Sight maintained a sort of pop 70's feel, The Limey dangles genre conventions from the '60s with aplomb. Unfortunately, these technical choices often get in the way of what is a rather paltry story line, bringing style over substance to the fore.

Soderbergh has sealed his paean to the '60s by casting two of that era's inimitable icons -- Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda -- and setting his story in the seedier parts of Los Angeles, the classic urban noir setting. The Limey shares a great deal -- both in style and substance -- with John Boorman's Point Blank, in which Lee Marvin embodies the paradigm of the alienated and wronged man against a greater power. Here, the wronged man is Stamp, playing an ex-con named Wilson. Having just gotten out of a nine-year prison stint in England, Wilson travels all the way to America to learn what has happened to his estranged daughter Jenny, who has died under "mysterious" circumstances.

Wilson seeks the help of Jenny's acting class friend Ed (Luis Guzman), who reluctantly points him in the direction of Jenny's acting teacher and friend Elaine (Lesley Anne Warren). With the help of Ed and Elaine, as well as unexpected assistance from the DEA, Wilson gains entrée into Jenny's past, a world ruled over by her lover Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a has-been record producer and sometime drug dealer who is directly responsible for her death. As the story unfolds, Wilson gets deeper and deeper enmeshed in Valentine's life, finally tracking him like a hunted animal on a beach in Carmel where Valentine confesses the truth about Jenny's death.

From the start of the film, Soderbergh seeks to disarm us with an overbearing use of editing to tell his story. Flashbacks and flashforwards, voice-over and looped dialogue as well as grainy documentary-style film stock add to the intentionally haphazard feel of the film. It's interesting to watch, but after awhile all these "ain't-it-cool" techniques start to get annoying. One of the more successful elements is the inspired intercutting of Ken Loach's 1967 film Poor Cow, which starred a then-beguilingly young Stamp. These sequences illuminate Wilson's sense of loss and his lack of connection to a more innocent past that seems eons away.

Soderbergh is clearly reaching for a distinctly retro style here -- a more in-your-face version of some of the bits in Out of Sight. However, more often than not, the style starts to interfere with one's immersion in the story. Some may claim that this is art, but it is art with a heavy hand where technical manipulation fills in when a deeper story is lacking. Indeed, Lem Dobbs' script fails on many counts, from its slim plotting to the simplistically laid out motivation for Wilson's vengeance.

More than anything, this is a one-man show, an exhuming of a man's past as he tries to find a place in a new world he doesn't understand, having been in jail for nine years. Soderbergh has made the right choice in casting Stamp as Wilson, although some of the rhyming dialogue he spouts makes him seem more Cockney caricature than flesh and blood man. On the surface, Stamp is a man driven by rage, but underneath there is a profound sense of loss and confusion. Fonda offers a perfect foil to Stamp's character; his Valentine is sleazy where Wilson is stoic and pitiful where Wilson is strong.

In many ways, The Limey shows Soderbergh embracing his independent filmmaker roots. He is juggling a lot of balls here and not all of them stay in the air. The result is an uneven film at best, filled with a plethora of technical tricks that don't always pay off. While Stamp and Fonda, as well as the rest of the fine cast, pull their own weight, they are often lost in the style that Soderbergh is trying to capture. This is much less a film about people than a film about filmmaking itself, a purposeful paean to pop culture, 60's grit, the power of the film icon and the filmmaker's right to play. It's rather like going to a Rothko exhibit; even when you know intellectually what he's going for, you still might not appreciate it.