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Steven Soderbergh's follow-up to his sexy thriller
Out of Sight is an equally stylish but far more austere crime drama, a work of memory that mixes flashbacks, flashforwards, and ruminations on the present into an invigorating cinematic quilt. Terence Stamp is Wilson, an aging cockney criminal fresh out of prison who flies to Los Angeles to search for his daughter's killer. She died in a car wreck, but he suspects that her lover, a music industry mogul named Valentine (Peter Fonda), knows more than he's telling. Wilson is a fish out of water indeed, a cool, cruel London thug on the airy, sun-bright street of L.A., a silver-haired criminal taking on street punks and hit men with the relentless drive of a man possessed. It's like
Get Carter channeled through
Point Blank, a hard-edged revenge thriller steeped in sorrow and regret, trading the warmth of
Out of Sight's romantic heat for a more contemplative remove. Fonda beautifully plays off his cinematic history of 1960s hippies and rebels as a nervous, cowardly millionaire sellout in white cotton peasant shirts and a deep California tan. Luiz Guzman and Lesley Ann Warren costar as Wilson's "adopted" guides through modern L.A., and Barry Newman is excellent as Valentine's tough, terse head of security, another aging pro blindsided by Wilson's relentless single-mindedness. Soderbergh quotes from Ken Loach's 1967 film
Poor Cow (sadly not available on video in the U.S.) for Wilson's flashbacks as a fresh-faced teenage thug.
--Sean Axmaker
Steven Soderbergh has proved himself adept at treating American subjects with the careful, sidelong scrutiny of a European eye, and this picture sustains the trend. Terence Stamp plays Wilson, an alarmingly well-preserved British criminal who arrives in Los Angeles to investigate the fate of his late daughter. His inquiries, which feel both bland and underhanded, lead him to Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a record producer with a house in the hills and a millionaire's tan. The film is restless, given to sudden cuts and mysterious bursts of imagined violence, and yet not much happens: as expected, the hero takes his revenge, but the motives of his victims remain veiled, and even Wilson's own grief seems cheapened by his casual termination of other lives. The movie has both the shimmer and the vacancy of an exercise in style; most beguiling by far are the scenes from Wilson's past, which Soderbergh has actually lifted from "Poor Cow," Ken Loach's 1967 film that featured Terence Stamp. It's as if the actor has only ever existed inside the movies. With Barry Newman and Lesley Ann Warren. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
