Sexy Beast

SEXY BEAST   ***1/2

Jonathan Glazer

2001

IDEA:  Retired gangster Gal is living an idyllic domestic life in southern Spain when an old associate comes to rope him into a bank heist.

BLURB:  Ben Kingsley’s lunatic gangster Don Logan drops into Sexy Beast like the most unwelcome houseguest ever, and despite the resistance of his hosts, he never really leaves. He’s a classic disruptor, an existential rupture signifying a return of the repressed. In the gangster genre, this comes in the form of a past acquaintance beckoning the protagonist back to a life of crime, and this is certainly the case in Sexy Beast. But Don Logan is not your typical gangster; in Glazer’s narrative formulation and Kingsley’s splanchnic performance, he’s more like the inextinguishable monster from a horror movie. And like a horror movie, Sexy Beast is about boundaries erected, transgressed, and put tenuously back up again. Glazer conceives of a number of imaginative metaphors for this border-crossing, perhaps none more so than the climactic break-in of a bank vault from an adjoining bathhouse, in which the violent drilling of the pool wall and the subsequent eruption of water is intercut with the bloody pummeling of Don Logan, seemingly unwilling to die - or stay dead. Gal’s laborious attempted suppression of Logan is coextensive with the generalized air of sexual repression and paranoia that, at the expense of the underwritten female characters, points up a frustrated masculinity that so often underlies gangster films. Although familiar in that way, Sexy Beast is crafted with such exciting, idiosyncratic audiovisual flair and caustic humor that it doesn’t quite feel like any other crime film out there.