Tell ’em I’m coming back
ON THE SURFACE at least, The Limey made sense. Having turned out a slick crime caper with 1998’s Out Of Sight and belatedly delivered on the debut-movie promise of 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape , Steven Soderbergh encored with a taut, irreverent, culture-clash revenge thriller starring ’60s icon Terence Stamp. To the delight of critics, the film took a “cubist” (his word) editorial approach that filtered its events through the emotion-racked memory of its main character, Wilson (Stamp), a cockney criminal seeking revenge in LA for the death of his daughter. However, audiences stayed away, and the film earned a paltry $3.2 million off a budget of three times that.
Yet The Limey is pure Soderbergh, strikingly inventive and intriguingly playful, and remains his greatest overlooked movie. Albeit one which, he admits to Empire during an hour-long deep dive into the 21-year-old lost classic, scared the willies out of him while he was making it…
It’s been just over 20 years since The Limey came out. How do you feel about where it sits in the Soderbergh firmament?
It’s a film that generates very positive feelings for
