Revenge Narratives: The Limey & Point Blank

The Limey (1999) is a straightforward revenge story not told very straight.  It has a clarity about its storytelling that one can’t quite comprehend while watching it. But revenge is very comprehensible.  It stands alongside jealousy and hubris as a plot and character developer.  Audiences never tire of it.  

The Limey’s Wilson (Terrence Stamp) has just been released from British prison after a 9-year sentence. During incarceration, his daughter moved to Los Angeles and was killed.  He is coming to La-La land to exact vengeance upon the people responsible for her death.  Another revenge narrative, perhaps, but what infuses the film is the feeling, through Stamp’s characterization of Wilson, that he represents the distilled vengeance from all past vengeance narratives.  

And the vengeance narrative that shadows over The Limey is John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin, who also goes by a single name, Walker, and also comes to Los Angeles to get satisfaction.  Wilson – Walker.  The names resonate through the respective films. 

Another similarity occurs in their finales.  Walker seeks $93,000, owed him by a treacherous friend, and at the very moment he can collect the money, he declines and remains in the shadows, fate unknown. Wilson has his prey, Terry Valentine, (Peter Fonda) under foot and helpless, yet also refrains from completing his mission and lets the rat live.

Walker and Wilson create massive havoc during their singular quests.  The syndicate in Point Blank and corrupt music producers in The Limey seem powerless to deal with them.  Both films depict the money men as corporate executives whose new status as business executives make them pillars of the community.

Among many other similarities, I find the personal baggage Walker and Wilson carry striking.  Walker’s wife (Sharon Acker) betrays him for Reese (John Vernon), and Walker’s first reaction upon entering her house and bedroom is to empty his gun into an empty bed.  He had wanted to punish her but also feels guilty for having introduced her to Reese.  She later explains her actions: however, Walker cannot respond or immediately forgive.  And before he can do anything to her, she overdoses on pills.  

Wilson’s guilt arises from going to prison and becoming absent from his daughter’s life.  She left England for America to become an actress.  He feels responsible for her death, having not been there for her.  What we do not learn until very late in the film is that Wilson’s arrest was instigated by his young daughter diming him out to the police.

The Limey’s coup de grace comes from the way Soderbergh tells Wilson’s back story.  We see flashbacks of a younger Terrence Stamp, with his wife and child, and when I first saw the movie thought that this was the product of Hollywood technology, making the sixty-five year Wilson look thirty.  I soon learned upon reading about the film that an early Stamp film, Poor Cow (1967), directed by Ken Loach, is used for the flashbacks.  Soderbergh had bought the rights to the film.  I don’t recall this happening in any other movie.