This summer's widely-acclaimed fancily-edited British gangster film (Sexy Beast) is far inferior to last summer's (Croupier), and its East London dialect is at times unintelligible to this American's ears.

In it, a plump, body-hairless, retired English professional criminal seemingly named "Gal" (Ray Winstone) is shown living in comfort in a large villa with a swimming pool in an otherwise deserted Andalusia. There is a local boy (Alvaro Monje), who hangs around and occasionally works for him. This is the only character in the film with any charm. And he is at the center of the three funniest moments in the movie.

Gal lives with a retired porn star, Dee-Dee (Amanda Redman). Their only friends in Spain are another English couple, Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Juliane White). Apparently the two men were colleagues, but the history and intensity of relationships between the pairs or between Aitch and Jackie remains opaque. It would seem that the film-makers' answer to the question "Who are these people?" would be "Who cares?" They certainly did not make me care.

A very profane Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) arrives to force Gal to return to England to be part of a heist from the safe deposit boxes of a firm that has very thick vault doors and is in the charge of one of the sneering aristocratic Foxes (Edward, I think, but I can't tell him apart from James and left the theater without watching the credits unreel).

Kingsley gets to act out, and Gal plays his part, despite being menaced by a ludicrous homicidal version of Harvey, the six-foot rabbit, in dreams, including some seemingly waking ones. There's also a cheesy boulder that flies over Gal and lands in the pool as an omen of the invasion that will come in the shape of Ben Kingsley.

There is also a pool in the building next to the bank, allowing for highly contrived cross-cutting between the London and the Spanish pools. Otherwise, almost the entire film is set in the desert house and in three restaurants. Except for that rapid-fire montage, the movie is more stagy than cinematic. The "one last job" plot is so tired that to call it a cliché would be to overpraise it. Neither visually or narratively is there anything new or even particularly accomplished here. Of course, there is rain of monsoon proportions to greet Gal back to England.

I would recommend this summer's French thriller (With a Friend Like Harry) instead. Or, despite its many problems of pacing and plausibility, "A.I." I totally fail to understand how this could be the film with the current highest critical ratings (the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle compiles these for movies in current release). Like life in Hobbes's state of nature, "Sexy Beast" is nasty, brutish, and (relatively, relievedly) short.

Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age