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Sexy Beast is a 2000 British film directed by Jonathan Glazer, starring Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, and Ian McShane. It was produced by Jeremy Thomas, and was Glazer's debut feature film. He had previously been a director of music videos, such as Rabbit in Your Headlights for British electronica group UNKLE,[1] and commercials for companies such as Guinness and Levi.
The film earned Kingsley an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.[2] In 2004 the magazine Total Film named Sexy Beast the 15th greatest British film of all time.[3]
Ex-con and expert safe-cracker Gary "Gal" Dove has served his time behind bars and blissfully retired to a Spanish villa with his beloved wife Deedee. He also has the company of longtime friend Aitch and his wife Jackie. Their idyll is shattered, however, by the arrival of an old criminal associate, the sociopathic Don Logan, who is intent on enlisting Gal in a bank heist back in London.
Dove politely but firmly refuses Logan's many requests to join the heist, but Logan will not back down. After revealing a lingering infatuation with Jackie, he makes several unwelcome attempts at reconnecting with her. Logan eventually grows violent, hurling torrents of abuse at the group while at the same time spitefully painting himself as a victim of their infidelity. After finally storming away in a rage, Logan is kicked off his plane and returns to Dove's home with the intention of murdering him. Instead, Deedee surprises him with a shotgun. The entire group combines their efforts, first beating and shooting him, and finally crushing his skull.
With Logan dead, Dove is forced to return to London to perform the job as if nothing has happened. Teddy Bass, a powerful crime lord, has organised the heist after learning about the bank from Harry, a banker who had sex with him at an orgy. Dove feigns ignorance over Logan's whereabouts, but Bass is immediately suspicious. Dove now fears both getting arrested by the police and being murdered by Bass. Since Logan's arrival, Dove's anxiety has manifested in strange dreams where he is menaced by a humanoid rabbit, which echoes a disastrous hunting trip earlier in the film.
During the heist, Bass' gangsters use surface-supplied diving gear and drill into Harry's bank vault from a pool in a neighboring bath house. The water from the pool floods the vault and shorts its security system. While helping to empty the vault's safe deposit boxes, Dove secretly pockets a pair of large ruby with diamond earrings. After the job is successfully completed, Bass forces Dove, who is unaware of Bass's intentions, to accompany him to kill Harry at Harry's house, potentially framing Dove for the murder in the process by tricking Dove into leaving his fingerprints in the house. Though Bass has realised the truth about Logan's murder, he does not care enough to retaliate by killing Dove. Instead, he forces Dove to forfeit his share of the loot and banishes him from London.
Dove returns safely home and his paradise is restored. Deedee wears the diamond earrings that he stole, and it is revealed that Logan is buried under the double-heart insignia at the bottom of their pool, which had been damaged by a falling boulder just prior to his arrival.
The film has received very positive reviews. As of February 4, 2008, the film has received an aggregate rating of 86 percent[4] on Rotten Tomatoes, deemed "Fresh" by the website. Another popular aggregate review website, Metacritic, has given it a rating of 79 percent[5] as of February 4, 2008, a rating which classifies the film as receiving "Generally favorable reviews" by the website's rating standards. It received high praise from writers at the San Francisco Chronicle,[6]Entertainment Weekly,[7]Slate,[8]Rolling Stone[9] and the Los Angeles Times,[10] but was panned by Stephen Hunter of Washington Post who described some of the film's moments as "Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes."[11] It was also described as "often enjoyable" but "massively uneven" by Variety.[12]
Ben Kingsley's performance received a majority of the accolades given to Sexy Beast, winning Best Supporting Actor awards from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, Florida Film Critics Circle, San Diego Film Critics Society, Southeastern Film Critics Association and the Toronto Film Critics Association. He also was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award (losing to Ian McKellen for his performance in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), a Golden Globe and an Academy Award (losing both to Jim Broadbent for his performance in Iris).
In addition, the film also won Best Director and Best Screenplay from the British Independent Film Awards and Special Recognition ("For excellence in filmmaking") from the National Board of Review.
In March 2008, Channel 4 re-released Sexy Beast on DVD and the now defunct HD DVD format in the UK, including a new commentary track with Kingsley and Jeremy Thomas, the film's producer. In June 2009, Channel 4 released a Blu-ray Disc of the film in the UK[13] which repackaged the HD DVD transfer and extras.
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