Sexy Beast ★★★★

DON Logan is one of the greatest villains in film history.

As played by Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, Logan is a force of nature at its most ferocious and chaotic.

Even though you don’t see Logan carry out much violence, the constant threat is absolutely palpable.

This is a human being who is wired differently to everyone else, capable of saying heinous things and doing heinous acts that are entirely understandable reasonable to his sociopathic brain.

The look on Ray Winstone’s character’s face when he is told that Don is going to visit is akin to the final minute of The Long Good Friday when Bob Hoskins’ character realises his fate.

Winstone is Gary ‘Gal’ Dove, a former safecracker with a ‘firm’ in London run by crime lord Teddy Bass, an also menacing Ian McShane.

Gal, along with his wife DeeDee, are enjoying an idyllic retirement at an expensive villa on the Coastal del Sol where they regularly entertain best friend Aitch, another former crook, and his wife Jackie.

When we meet Gal in the opening sequence of the film he is basking in the sun beside the pool in his speedos when suddenly, in an ominous, metaphorical act, a massive bounder rolls down a hill, just misses Gal and splashes into the water.

A day later the group get the call that Don is on his way, determined to convince Gal to return to London for another of Teddy’s robberies.

No matter how Gal tries, he cannot disavow Logan of his absolute confidence that Gal will return with him to London.

Released in 2000, this was the first feature for Jonathan Glazer and demonstrated some of the fantastical elements that the writer/director has carried throughout his career.

They may be a distraction for some, but it’s a stylistic approach that has continued to serve him well. As a debut, Sexy Beast is phenomenal.

Watched on Paramount