What a waste of my time!!!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

18 years ago I think I thought of it as another flashy, profane, British gangster movie with an astonishing performance by Ben Kingsley. Now I think it's one of the best flashy, profane, creative and well written, British or not, heist movies made. With an astonishing performance by Ben Kingsley. Everybody's good. Behind and in front of the camera What really surprised me was how good it is now, how well made it is that it could have been released this week and there'd be nothing to complain about.

With a cast like Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman and Ben Kingsley there was the thought that 'Sexy Beast' should be a really good film and couldn't go wrong.'Sexy Beast' lives up to its potential as a really good film, and rarely puts a foot wrong. While it may not quite one's definition of sexy, it is certainly a beast and a fine one at that. This is much more than a "Ray Winstone gangster film" as it deceivingly appears on the surface. Instead it is a neat, tense crime thriller that pulls no punches and doesn't hold back, scarily so in fact. While there is a lot to recommend in 'Sexy Beast', it is the performances that carry the film and what makes it as good as it is.Ray Winstone has seldom been more restrained and wisely so, while Ian McShane is creepy in an understated way, Amanda Redman is sensual and fiery and James Fox is solid. Stealing the film is Ben Kingsley who has never been more supremely terrifying than here, making for one of the most unforgettable screen psychos, anybody who knows him best from his gentler roles like Gandhi will still love him in those roles but not see them in the same way again.That the characterisation is meaty, particularly the juicy one for Logan (a dream part for anybody wanting to do something different to usual), and that the material is good helps, but it is more to do with that the cast are strong enough actors to do justice to it.Jonathan Glazer, in his film debut after his background in television adverts, brings slick tension and an audacious visual style to his directing. Visually, 'Sexy Beast' is bold, stylish and colourful, with the idyllic scenery contrasting wonderfully with the tension of the story. The music is suitably pulsating.'Sexy Beast's' script, in a dialogue-driven film, positively blisters and the intense brutality of a lot of it makes the most foul-mouthed Quentin Tarantino films family friendly in comparison. The story, while structurally slight, delivers on the suspense and tension and intrigues, particularly in the riveting confrontational chemistry between Winstone and Kingsley (the former in a way playing second fiddle to the latter).It's not a perfect film by all means. The tension and pacing slackens slightly in the later stages of the film and, although clever and slickly done, the caper subplot gets a little improbable towards being wrapped up.Otherwise, very good. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Sexy beast is one of the highly stylised Brit crime films that followed in the wake of the success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Like that one, it is full of cockney gangsters, camera trickery and some prominent rock tracks on the soundtrack, in this case an opening scene that plays out to 'Peaches' by The Stranglers. This laconic opening sequence indicates from the outset that this is going to be a crime film coming from a slightly different place though, it concludes with a giant boulder rolling down a hill and crashing into the lead character's pool, just missing him by a whisker. From this early point it becomes obvious that this isn't a film that is really going to go for realism and throughout the picture this is maintained with character actions and the final heist itself always seeming slightly absurd like a fever dream.A former gangster, who has retired to Spain, finds his relaxed lifestyle disrupted when one of his old associates turns up demanding that he return to England to be part of a team who will be executing an elaborate robbery.Directed by Jonathan Glazer who recently delivered the bizarre sci-fi film Under the Skin (2013), this is a short and sharp gangster film which is more character-driven than focused on the crime itself. The latter is a memorably surreal undertaking, which is in keeping with other moments from earlier, including freaky nightmare sequences where the lead character has dreams of a demon rabbit. But maybe for most people, the main draw here is the acting performances - Ray Winstone plays a typical character for him but one with a lot less aggression and much more inner fear, Ben Kingsley turns up and chews the scenery as the overbearing criminal Don Logan, while Ian McShane was, for me, even more intimidating as the top crime boss back in the UK, a character full of quiet, intense menace. Sexy Beast is a well-made Brit crime flick which comes from enough of a different angle to ensure that it doesn't feel too derivative, even if stylistically it owes something to the films of Guy Ritchie to an extent.

By the years of 2000-2001, the crime genre was becoming a little stale. While directors like Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie had made the genre fresh again in the 90's, they had inspired many others who copied their unique style of film-making to a much lesser degree, creating many films which ranged from merely being bad (e.g. Best Laid Plans, The Big Hit) or were completely morally bankrupt (e.g. The Boondock Saints, Natural Born Killers). Because of this, it was easy to cynically prejudge many crime films that were coming out in that era. Occasionally however, you have exceptions to this rule which manage to stand out on their own and not fall into the trappings of crime films of that era, like L.A Confidential, Seven & The Usual Suspects. Unfortunately, despite what it's glowing reviews, box office figures and awards nominations may tell you, Sexy Beast isn't one of those films. While not being a complete disaster it is a very uninspired film that it is so safe and predictable that it feels more like a straight to DVD film rather than anything else.The plot is that a retired gangster, Gary Dove, is currently living a quiet life in Spain, with his wife and friends in a luxury villa. However, his peace is shattered when his former boss Don Logan abruptly arrives asking him to do one last job involving robbing one of London's most high tech banks. A conflicted Gary now has to decide whether to stay in peace and shelter or return for one last time into a dark underworld that might cost him dearly. The plot may sound very engaging at first, but it suffers from being utterly predictable, making the story lack any sort of tension or threat. It doesn't help that the heist isn't the movie's main focus, as most of the movie is spent focusing on the main character and how his decisions will affect those in the movie around him. While that does make the movie sound like an interesting character study, it isn't as there is little time focused on the main character's conflict, and rather is spent more time on Tarantino- esque conversations that don't advance the story much or Ben Kingsley's Don Logan, a character who seems entirely superfluous to the narrative, which considering how he takes up a lot of screen time is a major problem. The heist also suffers from the fact that the characters pull it off so easily and are unaffected by it's minimal consequences because of it, leading to a complete lack of tension in the process. This highlights the film's main problem: there is nothing at stake here, as the plot is so predictable and simple, the main heist of the film is so easy to pull off and NONE of the characters change at all by the end of the film as a result. This makes the film all the more pointless of an experience to watch because of it.However, there are some positive attributes that this movie has to offer. The film is at least very well-made and all of the cast work give great performances and the film at least has some style. Music video director Jonathan Glazer does the best he can with such bland material by giving the film look good, using some clever camera-work and has art-house touches here and there, particularly a demonic rabbit motif that looks like something out of the deleted scenes of Donnie Darko. All of these stylistic touches are great, making it look like Terry Gilliam directing a gangster movie, and it helps the film get some much-needed distinction. I just wish with material this generic, Glazer had tried to be more ambitious and risky and had made the film more art-house by cranking his Kubrick, Gilliam and Fincher influences up to 11, as it may have been more memorable film. Sure it may have been more pretentious, but at least I would have admired it more because of it for being ambitious. A film like Snatch for example that came out at a similar time tries to recapture the brilliant plotting of Pulp Fiction, but fails, becoming an incoherent mess in the process and proved that director Guy Ritchie was way out of his depth. While at least I could admire that movie for at least having ambition, Sexy Beast mostly lacks this and when it does try to be artistically challenging, you can tell there is a more provocative and compelling gangster flick in there struggling to get out. As it is though, this is your standard Tarantino-esque knock-off whose plot so safe and characters so uninteresting that there is nothing truly memorable about the film apart from a few scenes, making it feel like this should have stayed away from theaters and should have gone straight-to-DVD where it belongs. Sure it's nowhere near as bad as 44 Inch Chest (although few movies are that bad), which is from the same writers and features much of the same cast, as Sexy Beast is average rather than flat-out awful. It's clearly well-made, has a great cast and that director Jonathan Glazer has talent and shows potential for his future endeavors into film- making. However, it suffers from similar problems as 44 Inch Chest: it spends an hour focusing on pointless build-up, but fails to develop an interesting narrative or characters in that time and when the film gets to its main set-piece it is a major disappointment, making the viewing experience feel rather superfluous. Sure, while there are great performances and brilliant artistic touches here and there, all in all, this is just a safe and generic trope that despite its strong word of mouth should have gone straight-to-DVD, due to its lack trying to do anything innovative and experimental to a genre that by this point in time had run out of steam.