"Lovely, lovely," murmurs the huge moun-tain of sweaty flesh in a Speedo. The sweaty flesh licks its lips, savoring the brilliant heat of the Mediterranean sun beating down upon its glorious fleshiness. The flesh has a name — Gal Dove — and for him this is as good as it gets. The nominal hero of Sexy Beast, Gal (Ray Winstone) is a gone-to-seed pretty boy and retired professional thief, recently relocated from gray, drizzly London to the sunny south of Spain, where he now spends his days lounging by the pool and hanging out in nice ristorantes with his ex-porn-star girlfriend and their neighbors, another couple of agreeable, expatriate ex-thugs. Gal and his pals aren't bad sorts, really — just people with pasts trying to put it behind them and enjoy a little harmless R&R in their fast-approaching golden years.
So complete is Gal's heat-induced reverie during the first moments of Sexy Beast that he barely notices the massive boulder that comes bounding down from the hills and crashes into his swimming pool, barely missing his suntan-oil-lathered ear. An omen of things to come, it's a surreal, bizarrely funny but potentially dangerous moment — the first among many in this off-kilter but often deadly serious film, which is always drop-dead stylish and maximum-energy.
If Gal's good life seems too good to be true, or at least too good to last (in the movies, at least), you're right. That hunch is quickly confirmed when a fatal phone call leads to a visit from a former acquaintance of Gal's — although "acquaintance" is far too polite a word to describe one of the most menacing and volatile figures ever to appear on a movie screen. Superbly played by Ben Kingsley, the gangster Don Logan is more a force of nature than a flesh-and-blood human being. He's a London East End equivalent to Joe Pesci's loose cannon character in GoodFellas, only scarier.
It's more than a little disconcerting to see Kingsley, an actor best known for his sympathetic portrayals of modern saints, transformed into the abominable, barely human Logan. With his hairless Gandhi dome offset by a satanic little goatee, and exuding an essence that sets the skin crawling, Kingsley/Logan gobbles up every scene in which he appears (no easy task in a film filled with excellent performances). A man of few words, Logan's icy, reptilian demeanor explodes periodically into brutish rages, and he uses both sides of his personality to browbeat Gal into coming out of retirement and joining an elite crew hand-picked to pull off a major bank robbery back in London.
It's basically an offer that can't be refused. After much physical and emotional abuse, Gal finally succumbs to the Terminator-like Logan's relentless pressure and reluctantly agrees to pull off the London job. Up to this mid-point, Sexy Beast has fashioned itself as a kinky sort of chamber piece focused on the intense dynamics bubbling away between the little group of transplanted Brits. Then the movie suddenly makes an abrupt but very satisfying transformation into one of the oddest and most strikingly conceived heist movies of recent years.
From the ultra-hip visual style to the English underworld milieu to the often obsessive bleeding-over of the comic into the cruel, the influence of Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) is unmistakable. Frankly, though, Sexy Beast is a much better movie than anything Ritchie's done to date. While Madonna's hubby deals primarily in buffoons and caricatures — characters we don't really care about and find it difficult to remember — even the minor figures in Sexy Beast are richly drawn and seem to possess powerful and intriguing inner lives. One of these characters, a black-magic-practicing master criminal named Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) is only on screen for a handful of scenes but seems to scream out for his own movie. Gal and Logan, as if you haven't already guessed, are two of the most memorable characters you'll ever meet in a film.
The movie's score, a bass-heavy pulse throbbing away under the surface like a subliminal alarm, adds to the edge and near-constant sense of danger that keeps us guessing almost every step of the way in Sexy Beast. The characters' East End accents are as thick as Gal's midsection and sometimes a little difficult to decipher, but that's hardly a problem in a movie good enough to speak for itself.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2001.