TORONTO -- Sexy Beast, a festival gala tonight at Roy Thomson Hall, has lots of things going for it, but these two stand out:

The wickedly funny heist flick features the best opening credits since The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

It also has Gandhi guy Ben Kingsley going bad to the bone in the scary guise of a South London low-life thug.

"Very releasing to play him," says Kingsley yesterday of the dastardly Don in Sexy Beast.

As mighty mean as Kingsley's creep is, director Jonathan Glazer gets to the tongue-in-cheeky point with his smirking and glib opening sequence for Sexy Beast.

It has Gary (Ray Winstone) sunbathing poolside at his Spanish hacienda to the sounds of The Stranglers' Peaches.

A well-placed crotch shot of the guy called Gary, who is obviously beyond his prime, is reserved for the freeze frame title shot, an introduction to a quirky little movie yarn about bad dudes planning a dirty deed.

"Tough as the movie might seem, I wanted to let the audience know they were allowed to laugh," says Glazer.

Not surprisingly, the picture is also slick when it wants to be. First-timer Glazer made his name shooting innovative rock videos -- memorably Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity -- and award-winning TV commercials -- lots of Guinness spots.

So why a tough-guy picture? Glazer was intrigued by the story. Luckily, so was Kingsley, who liked the fact that "the dialogue does the dancing in the picture."

The baddest dancing, of course, is done by Kingsley's Don, who is sent to Spain from London to persuade chubby Gary (Winstone) to come out of retirement for a bank job.

From there, the action and suspense are usually overshadowed by the crisp dialogue and the fancy wordplay.

That doesn't exclude Sexy Beast from some violent passages as defined by Kingsley's dangerous depiction of the psychotic. But Kingsley makes no apologies for the evil essence of his character.

"I'm holding a mirror to the audience and telling them there is a violent person in all of us," Kingsley reports.

If the violent stuff is jarring, the actor sees that as a positive thing in what is becoming a too-correct film world.

It's like see no evil, know no evil. "The way Jonathan has put it together," says Kingsley of the director, "it is far more life-affirming than it is corrosive."

Fine but gentle Ben, has anybody ever called you a sexy beast?

The very proper Kingsley considers that bold bit of intrusiveness for a brief moment.

"Two nights ago," he says in his most dignified English cadence, "I have to tell you, a woman approached, and told me that I was the sexiest man alive, and that she had to tell me that."

He's shaking his head now, disappointed a little.

"But no," he adds devilishly, "the word beast was never used."


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