Sexy Beast

Watched the film Sexy Beast last night. Very interesting. It's a robbery flick, where a guy who's retired to sunny Spain is asked come back to London to do one more job. Maybe it's inaccurate to call it a robbery flick, because the focus of it is more on getting the guy to do the job than the job itself.

Ray Winstone plays the guy who's asked to come out of retirement by Ben Kingsley, who's playing a character with the moral opposite of the Gandhi role that made him famous. Even before Kingsley arrives in Spain, the knowledge that he's coming is enough to ramp up the tension between Winstone, his wife and the couple they pal around with in Spain, who are all familiar with how brutal Kingsley's character is.

But Kingsley isn't the head bad guy - his character's too much of aloose canon for that. No the head bad guy is Ian McShane, who I first enjoyed in the Lovejoy tv series and has more recently found notoriety in Deadwood.

The robbery itself actually stretches the limit of plausibility to me, but it's not really the point of the film. It's more about interplay between the three characters played by Winstone, Kingsley and to lesser extent McShane (because he has less screen time), and how the past can haunt you and how in particular Winstone is going to deal with these characters from his criminal past that he'd really rather just say no to.

But sometimes saying no is a very difficult thing to do.