Sexy Beast: Kingsley's Terrifying Retired-Villain Turn

By 2000 the British gangster film had eaten itself. The post-Lock, Stock wave had turned the genre into a costume party — geezers, banter, a soundtrack of period soul, violence played for a laugh, everybody having a marvellous time being naughty. Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast arrived in the middle of that and did something the wave had made almost impossible: it made a London criminal frightening again, by shipping him to Spain and pointing him at a man in a sun lounger.

The opening is the most quoted three minutes in modern British crime cinema and it earns the reputation. Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), retired, mahogany-brown, contentedly enormous, lies by his pool in the Spanish hills narrating his own satisfaction. A boulder detaches from the hillside above the villa, bounces down, misses him by a yard, and demolishes the pool. Gal watches it go with the mild interest of a man observing weather. Glazer, arriving from a decade of adverts and music videos, tells you the entire film in one gag: a life that looks solid, an object descending on it from somewhere else, and a man too comfortable to move.

Don Logan

The object, when it arrives properly, is Ben Kingsley. Don Logan has been sent from London by Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) to collect Gal for a job. Gal does not want the job. Gal has a wife he adores, a friend, a pool and a heart condition, and he says no.

Don does not accept no. The film’s central hour is a siege conducted entirely through conversation in a nice house, and it is one of the most sustained pieces of intimidation ever put on screen, because Kingsley never once does the thing you brace for. He does not loom. He is small, wiry, arid, permanently affronted, and he wears the language of ordinary annoyance — the tutting, the pedantry, the correction of small factual errors — as an instrument of terror. He is a man who cannot be embarrassed, and everyone in that house can.

The casting is the joke and the joke is load-bearing. Kingsley had been Gandhi for eighteen years. The audience of 2000 walked in carrying that, and Glazer detonated it. What Kingsley found in Don is a specifically English kind of violence: the violence of the man who is right, who has been put out, who has come a long way and would like some basic courtesy. Louis Mellis and David Scinto’s script gives him a torrent of it, and Kingsley delivers it at a clip that makes the room feel airless. He was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor and lost, which the passage of twenty-five years has not made any more explicable.

Winstone plays it soft

The performance everyone under-praises is Ray Winstone’s. Winstone’s whole professional identity was the hard man — Scum, Nil by Mouth, the raised voice, the physical threat. Glazer cast that reputation and then had him play tenderness for two hours. Gal loves DeeDee (Amanda Redman) with an uncomplicated devotion. He is polite. He is affectionate with his friends. He is, above all, afraid, and Winstone plays the fear without a shred of the compensating swagger that lesser actors reach for.

The dynamic that results is genuinely novel. Gal is twice Don’s size and could physically destroy him at any moment in the film, and it is entirely irrelevant, because Don has something Gal gave up: the willingness to make everything worse. Gal has a life he wants to keep. That is the lever, and Don finds it in about four minutes. The film understands that intimidation is a transaction in which the frightening party is simply the one with less to lose.

The craft: heat and cold

Ivan Bird’s photography splits the film into two climates and the split does the thematic work. Spain is sun-drunk, saturated, orange, over-lit to the point of hallucination — a place where a man sweats out into a chair. London is grey, vertical, wet and modern. Glazer shoots the two locations as though they belong to different genres, because to Gal they do: one is the life, the other is the job that bought it.

Roque Baños’s score and the film’s cutting come from Glazer’s advertising discipline, which in 2000 was regarded as a mark against him and now reads as the whole point. He can put over an idea in four frames. The dream sequences — Gal’s nightmares, the rabbit-headed figure with a gun — arrive without warning or explanation, and Glazer resists every temptation to justify them. They are the fear leaking out sideways. Fourteen years later he made Under the Skin with the same instinct: trust the image, refuse the exposition.

The screenplay deserves its own note. Louis Mellis and David Scinto had written Gangster No. 1 out of the same instinct — a conviction that English criminal speech is fundamentally about status anxiety, and that the most frightening thing a villain can do is keep talking. Their dialogue for Don is written as a percussion part: repetitions, reversals, questions that are not questions, sentences that circle back on themselves until the room gives up. It reads on the page like a man having a breakdown. Kingsley plays it as a man having an argument he has already won, which is what converts it from noise into pressure.

Ian McShane’s Teddy Bass, meanwhile, is the film’s structural answer to Don, and Glazer holds him back until the last third for a reason. Don is loud because Don has to be. Bass never raises his voice once. He is the man Don works for, and the film’s grimmest implication is that Don’s whole terrifying performance is itself the behaviour of a frightened employee.

The heist itself, when it finally happens, is played almost as an afterthought, and the choice is deliberate. Glazer has spent an hour teaching you that the job was never the danger.

The real ancestor

Every review in 2000 filed Sexy Beast against Lock, Stock and Snatch, and that comparison is a category error — it explains what the film is reacting against and nothing about where it came from. The real ancestor sits sixteen years earlier: Stephen Frears’s The Hit, which has the identical premise. An English criminal has retired to the Spanish sun. The London firm has not forgotten. Emissaries arrive. The country’s brightness turns out to offer no protection whatsoever, because the thing that has come for him is a debt, and a debt travels.

Frears played it as a becalmed philosophical comedy and Glazer plays it as an anxiety attack, and the two films together make the best double bill in British crime cinema. The other essential comparison is The Long Good Friday, whose Harold Shand is what Gal would have become had he stayed: a man who believed his empire was an achievement rather than a lease. And for the register that made all of this possible, Get Carter remains the source — the film that first insisted a British criminal should be genuinely unpleasant to be near.

A verdict, argued

Sexy Beast is a small film that behaves like a large one. It has perhaps five significant characters, three locations and a plot that could be summarised on a postcard, and it uses the compression to generate a pressure that bigger crime pictures rarely reach. Its weakness is structural and worth naming: the third act, once the siege resolves, has to deliver a heist and an aftermath, and neither has anything like the voltage of the middle hour. The film peaks early and knows it.

That flaw is survivable because the middle hour is extraordinary and because Glazer’s last movement has a different ambition — it is interested in what Gal has to live with rather than whether the job succeeds. Ian McShane’s Teddy Bass, arriving late, is the film’s second great performance, a man whose stillness makes Don look like a hobbyist.

What the film really did was end an argument. After 1998 the British gangster was a lovable rogue. Sexy Beast put a small bald man in a spare bedroom and reminded everyone that these people are exhausting, humiliating and dangerous to know, and the genre has never entirely recovered its confidence about the fun version. It streams widely and holds up on any screen; the boulder still lands.

Spoilers below

Stop here if you have not seen it. The film’s structure depends on a surprise it plays at the halfway mark.

Don Logan does not survive the siege. Gal, DeeDee, Aitch and Jackie kill him in the villa, and Glazer stages it with a deliberate, appalling clumsiness — no choreography, no catharsis, four frightened middle-aged people making a mess. The film’s most famous performance exits at roughly the midpoint, which is a genuinely audacious piece of construction, and it converts the remaining hour into something quite different from what you had been watching.

Because Don’s death is the trap. Gal now has to go to London anyway, do the job for Teddy Bass, and spend every second of it knowing that Bass will eventually ask where Don is. The last act’s tension has nothing to do with vaults or alarms; it is a man being interviewed by a predator while carrying a secret that will kill him if it shows. McShane plays Bass’s suspicion as pure politeness, which is far worse than rage, and Winstone plays a man holding his face together with both hands.

The vault job — swimming into a bank’s strongroom through the neighbouring bathhouse — is shot as an absurd, flailing, waterlogged shambles, and the take is almost worthless. Glazer’s final joke is that the crime everyone risked everything for produces nothing much at all.

Gal goes home. He gets away with it, and the film’s last image returns him to the pool, the sun, DeeDee, the life he was prepared to kill for. Don is under the patio. The boulder from the opening was never the threat; the threat was that Gal was always going to say yes, and the only real question was what it would cost.