Fresh from a nine-year stretch, tea-leaf Dave Wilson (Terence Stamp) deserts his manor for Los Angeles, on account of daughter Jenny buying it in an automobile smash. She was caught up with ageing rock impresario Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) and Wilson, an estranged father looking to allay some of his own guilt, scents revenge. "Tell me about Jenny." People will die.

Reuniting director Soderbergh with Lem Dobbs, author of his all-but-unseen second feature Kafka, The Limey makes for an odd and distinctly chilly fish-out-of-water thriller. That's thriller like Boorman's Point Blank thrills: harsh, existential single-mindedness. The narrative identifies the route, but this pair seem hell bent on pureeing the map before hitting the road: this is post-mod with knobs on. The clash of film stocks, repetition, jagged editing and overlapping dialogue - collateral thought - pushes the laboratory atmosphere of the previous Out Of Sight and The Underneath to its very limits; it's a short fall from the high cliff of experimentalism after here. Soderbergh calls it "Alan Resnais making Get Carter".

That the cast survive his Performance-esque rollercoaster is down both to individual skill and Soderbergh's refusal to surrender content to style. Stamp's job is made doubly difficult by a screenplay that wants to abuse cliché without becoming it. His dialogue is a Cockney embarrassment of hard-man rhyming slang both laughable and played to the hilt. (Soderbergh offers us flashbacks to Wilson's hey-day via skilfully integrated clips from Ken Loach's Poor Cow, with a young and startlingly handsome Stamp playing, yes, a villain called Wilson.) Fonda is excellent as a man whose arrogance has outstripped both nerve and ability, and Lesley Ann Warren and Luis Guzman provide notable support as Wilson's aides-de-camp. The whole is beautifully shot by Ed Lachman and scored by regular collaborator Cliff Martintez.

Of course, the torrent of detail, the narrative's arc and the pedantry of Stamp's argot do all go to suggest that nothing here is perhaps what it seems. That the plane cabins bookending the movie are one and the same. That the whole is Stamp's gaol-fed macho reverie: get the bad guys and the girl. His imagined assault on Valentine at the party - we see a handful of scenarios - underscores our argument.

Which funkiness does, ultimately, militate against not only sentimentalism but emotionality per se. Soderbergh has purposely designed a film to admire more than love. And that's good: sometimes we should demand brain food and not a simple heart massage. The Limey is here not just to be seen but revisited.