Sexy Beast: Movie & DVD Review (2001)

(Originally published 2001)

The opening of Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast” is a stunner. In it, the camera hovers above Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a doughy, 40-something English crook lying flat on his back in the heat of a blistering sun.

In spite of his burnt skin and unflatteringly tight Speedo, everything about Gal seems white-trash cool--right down to his chunky gold necklace, cheap silver rings and badly tipped hair.

But when a boulder steamrolls down the hill behind Gal’s swanky Spanish villa and becomes airborn, whizzing past his head before slamming into the bottom of his heart-tiled pool, it seems as if even nature knows that Gal’s cool is about to be tested in a deadly series of events.

With style and a pounding industrial score, Glazer, working from a screenplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, swings the meat of his movie around Gal’s relationship with Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a psychopathic mobster from London who wants to pull Gal out of retirement for one last job.

But Gal wants none of it. Neither does his former porn star wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman), or their drinking friends, Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White), who are so oiled and leathery, they might as well be moving armoires.

Everyone involved shares a past with Logan, whose dirty mouth and violent, ugly meanstreak are easy to fear and loathe. The result? Absolute fireworks--especially when Logan starts demanding that Gal join him on a frightfully well-conceived bank heist (ripped straight out of John Quested’s 1980 British film “Loophole”) with the debonair criminal, Teddy Bass (Ian McShane).

“Sexy Beast” is a good film that hasn’t travelled well; sometimes it’s impossible to decipher the strong Cockney accents and, worse, if you don’t understand the local slang, well, it’s obvious you’re missing a good deal of the film.

Still, much like “The Limey” and “Croupier,” there’s enough here to intoxicate an American audience, particularly fans of Harold Pinter and David Mamet, who will respond to the film’s stagy scenes, icy chill and doubletalk. The performances are uniformly excellent, particularly Kingsley’s Logan, who offers a spectacular twist on DeNiro’s Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” and Winstone’s, who grounds the movie with a bearish presence that’s at once intimidating, exhilarating--and, in the end, oddly comforting.

Grade: B+