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Teddy Bass is planning another heist, and he needs his old safe cracker. To make his pitch, Teddy sends in the ultimate negotiator - a man physically incapable of taking no for an answer. Don Logan isn’t just what you’d call a hard man. He’s the walking embodiment of every disappointment, heartbreak, failure and betrayal experienced by every man woman and child on earth. He never smiles, rarely blinks, and only occasionally pees on the floor. He’s a sledgehammer in slacks. And now, he has an offer for Gary.

I’m not going to tell you whether he says yes or no because while the answer seems obvious, it’s not that simple. The thing that makes Sexy Beast seem jagged is that the way Kingsley dominates his time on screen, you’d think he’d be the central character. But as I said he’s not - Gary is. Don is a crucible - a snarling, spitting, cursing, living crucible through which Gary must pass just to have the chance at redemption.

The idea here is that you don’t get to just walk away from the life you’ve lived free and clear, without paying a toll of some kind. Not only will Don not take no for an answer, but he’s perfectly willing to ruin the lives of all his former compatriots to get what he wants. Gary makes a decision, but the movie’s last act requires him to answer for it, and by extension answer for turning his back on the gang. Sexy Beast is not a 100 percent traditionally structured story, which may be part of the reason it feels so uneven.

Of course, the other part of that might be because it IS uneven. Questions remain - at the end, did Gary really suffer for anything, or was this all just a minor convenience? Was he more conflicted than he let on about going back to a life of crime? Did Terry intend to teach Gary a lesson right from the start? If so, the payback doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal. It’s like the old joke about the Pink Gorilla who gets poked through the bars at the zoo and tears up an entire city block just to say “Tag, you’re it!”. Really? That’s it?

It was a calculated risk to exclusively spend the first act of the film luring the audience into a false sense of security, so that Don’s appearance is all the more jarring. It works, but it’s done so at the expense of giving us a true sense of everybody’s background and former relationship. It’s made clear early on that all of these characters share secrets. Yet, few of those secrets are explored throughout the story, and the ones that are get exposed for their lurid effect, and little more. This has the effect of making the consequences of Gary’s decisions seem less significant than they should.

Sexy Beast is a story about redemption, truth, consequences, and all that - but it takes place in a vacuum, like a television episode where the crisis is solved just in time for the last commercial, and next week it’s like nothing ever happened. It’s a bit of a wasted opportunity, but I have to give credit where credit is due - the film aspires to tell a familiar story in an unusual way. Whether you come away impressed or appalled, you will think about this movie for a while after it’s over and when a drama can do that, it’s an achievement in and of itself.

And if that’s not enough, it’s not every day you get to see Gandhi hit someone in the face with a bottle. That’s kind of cool, too.

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