Gal (the excellent Ray Winstone) is a retired British gangster living the life of ease in a Spanish villa with his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman) and two nearby friends, Aitch (Cavan Kendall, from whose Cockney-accented dialogue I could not pick a single intelligible word) and his wife Jackie (Julianne White). Into Gal's life crashes Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a psychotic former associate who's trying to recruit him for another job back in England. Gal refuses, but Don doesn't give up easily.
The relationship between Gal and Don drives the first half of the movie, but it's not quite the tense struggle of wills I suspect it was meant to be. For one thing, Don is just a foaming-at-the-mouth psycho -- he has no hidden depths or nuances. Yeah, he's scary, but frankly, he's not that interesting. I wanted to know why he so desperately wanted Gal to do this job, especially since it doesn't seem as though Gal has any special skills without which the heist could not succeed. You definitely get the sense of some history between the two men; at times, Don seems like a vindictive spurned lover (other times, he just seems like a spoiled child).
But Don isn't in the second half of the movie, and there's no dramatic tension or conflict to take up the slack. I thought the movie was dragging out the scenes between Don and Gal unnecessarily, but things seemed to slow down even more -- despite more physical action -- once Gal reaches England and takes part in the burgling of a bank vault. The movie just doesn't hang together well; too much depends on the crime boss figuring out (complete lack of evidence notwithstanding) that Gal's done something bad, or on the supposedly most secure bank vault in the country not having any security system to speak of.
The movie that kept coming to mind was The Hit, partly because it has somewhat the same storyline -- a British criminal who's fled to Spain is tracked down by his old associates -- and partly because the two films are similar in scale. But The Hit succeeds in creating fascinating characters and weaving a real sense of menace, whereas in Sexy Beast, Gal is the only character you could call fully formed. You feel menace from Don's violent ravings, but it's superficial and doesn't linger when he's not on screen.
This is director Jonathan Glazer's first movie; his work up to now has been in commercials, and it occasionally shows in annoying ways. He loves to use gimmicky shots, like a camera going through a revolving door, for no reason, and he composes set pieces where the actors self-consciously pose like Ralph Lauren models. He tries too hard to be arty sometimes; he does a far better job when he lets the action unfold naturally and doesn't flail his arms to draw your attention to some affectatious aesthetic.
I'm being
rather harsh on the film because I was disappointed, and that's
my problem. It is a funny movie, and Winstone's
performance
really is terrific. A lot has been made of Kingsley's sociopath
versus
his portrayal of Gandhi (twenty years ago), but if the last thing you
remember
Ben Kingsley in is Gandhi, you really need to get out more.
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