By focusing on its meaty characters and minimizing the gadgetry, Sexy Beast emerges as a genuinely original and greatly entertaining heist flick. Retired thief Gary "Gal" Dove, played with gusto by Ray Winstone, gets pulled away from his cushy poolside married life in Spain by monstrous homunculus Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) to assist in the ubiquitous "one last job." Sounds familiar, but Glazer breaks the genre's mold by emphasizing Gal's sincere and tenacious unwillingness to return to criminal life and by letting the battle of wills between Don and Gal (and Gal's expatriate entourage) take center stage. Gal's high life is interrupted first by a giant boulder that comes crashing down the hillside into his swimming pool, foreshadowing the subsequent appearance of Don, an even scarier force of nature.
Ben Kingsley's unforgettable cockney creation Don is a growling pipe-bomb packed full of malice, squeezing each scene he's in by the short sack. Don's a compact Satan, always raging. But Ray Winstone holds his own--his flabby, charismatic tough-guy-gone-soft Don is an equally impressive screen presence. The heist scene itself is clever and quick, visceral rather than monotonously technical. The contrast between Sexy Beast's fluid vault-cracking and the tediously over-planned and tool-heavy heisting in The Score perfectly sums up the difference between original storytelling and Hollywood formula-polishing. Some of Glazer's flashy editing is a little too slick, but the movie's unflagging energy is infectious, and the performances by Winstone, Kingsley and the rest of the cast are super.