The Limey · reception & legacy
1999 · Steven Soderbergh
How The Limey has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A box-office blip in 1999 (it grossed barely $3M) with respectful-but-muted reviews, it's since climbed into the top tier of Soderbergh's filmography — now routinely called one of his very best and a high-water mark for the '90s revenge picture.
What's debated
The perennial fight is over the fractured, time-scrambled editing: transcendent memory-piece or art-house gimmick pasted onto a simple revenge plot — and whether this, not Out of Sight, is peak '90s Soderbergh.
Its footprint
Terence Stamp bellowing 'Tell him I'm coming!' is the film's calling card, and its DVD commentary — Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs openly arguing about what the director did to the script — is legendary in its own right, often cited as the most contentious commentary track ever recorded.
Where it stands
A certified cinephile cult object — the 'underseen Soderbergh' that film Twitter and Letterboxd lists perpetually push on people, usually with the phrase 'why isn't this more famous?'
Named by the director
Influences Steven Soderbergh has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.
- Point Blank (1967) — Soderbergh repeatedly cited Boorman's fractured LA revenge classic as the model for The Limey's dislocated structure and lone-avenger story.
- Get Carter (1971) — Soderbergh famously pitched the film as 'Get Carter made by Alain Resnais' — the hard British gangster-revenge template.
- Alain Resnais — The other half of that pitch: Soderbergh invoked Resnais for the memory-shuffled, time-fragmented editing approach.