Well, fans of Jonathan Glazer’s cult classic film from 2000 can relax on one front: the orange swimming trunks are back, present and correct in an almost identical opening shot.
I’m hesitant to call a pair of orange swimming trunks iconic, but if anyone remembers anything about the original Sexy Beast it is usually Ray Winstone’s orange swimming trunks. Well, that and the boulder. But they couldn’t really have done the boulder, could they?
As we pull back from that copycat opening frame, however – this time to Should I Stay Or Should I Go by The Clash rather than The Stranglers’ Peaches – we see that the tanned body belongs instead to James McArdle, who is playing an eight-years-previous version of Winston’s Gary ‘Gal’ Dove.
He is sunbathing on a rooftop rather than at the Spanish villa of the film, signalling that he is yet to make his money. Gal’s friend/partner-in-crime Don Logan (formerly Ben Kingsley, now Emun Eliot) appears suddenly and puts a double barrel shotgun in his face purely for what are now called lolz, but in 1992 east London, so it’s more for a fackin’ larf, mate. “I coulda turned your ’ead into a meat pie!” he larfs.
Soon they are off, turning over a club and administering warning beatings and coming up with imaginatively gruesome ways to torture info out of people. “That’ll teach them c***s to mess with your sister’s place of business,” Gal beams. “We showed em! Old school! Smash and grab!”
If all this is sounding a bit Guy Ritchie, then that’s because it is all a bit Guy Ritchie. Cartoonishly menacing gangster guys sit in private rooms at the back of nightclubs smoking and drinking whiskey and making plans to do over each other.
Gal and Don end up doing the bidding of gang supremo Teddy Bass: formerly Ian McShane, now the main vampire guy from True Blood, Stephen Moyer, who still looks quite a lot like a vampire. Very quickly it all goes, to use the period-correct parlance, tits up.
The casting, it has to be said, is… off kilter. Who casts a baby faced Scottish RADA grad as a young Ray Winstone? Then another Scottish thesp as his psychotic running mate? And when considering who should play his psychotic violent running mate’s even more psychotic sister-slash-crime-matriarch, thinks “I know! Let’s call Tamsin Grieg!”
To give all the above their dues – Grieg in particular is clearly having a blast playing against type – they are all fine, the London geezer-accents only very occasionally veering into dodgy territory. The problem is more what they are saying in those accents, because by Christ this is by-numbers stuff. “The straight life ain’t for me!” someone says at one point. “I’m gonna get a knife and stick in your fackin’ face!” another someone says at another. There are “big jobs”. The police are “the filth”. You actually hear someone say “In for a penny, in for a pound”, not once but twice.
We do also meet Gal’s future wife Deedee (Sarah Greene) living her former life as porn star Veronica Aims. Hers are by far the best scenes, and had they focused on her story – battling her directors and trying to break out on her own – this might have felt less like generic Danny Dyer straight to DVD type stuff.
But that would have been too imaginative. Who knows why Paramount Plus have taken it upon themselves to backstory these cult classics but it feels like money that could be better spent than on a series that will please absolutely no one: least of all, I suspect, devotees of the film on which it is based.
