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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 11 November 2007
This a movie review of SLEUTH (2007). |
“Maggie never told me you were... such a manipulator. She told me you were no good in bed, but she never told me you were such a manipulator,” Milo Tindle (Jude Law)
In theory there is an embarrassment of riches with the creative team behind SLEUTH: Kenneth Branagh directing, celebrated playwright Harold Pinter adapting, and Michael Caine and Jude Law in front of the camera. The levels of experience boded well. Theory and reality do not always go hand in hand. The end product is a disappointing waste of time which adds nothing to the 1972 original.
In theory there is an embarrassment of riches with the creative team behind SLEUTH: Kenneth Branagh directing, celebrated playwright Harold Pinter adapting, and Michael Caine and Jude Law in front of the camera. The levels of experience boded well. Theory and reality do not always go hand in hand. The end product is a disappointing waste of time which adds nothing to the 1972 original.
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Law’s Milo Tindle has been invited by best-selling crime novelist Andrew Wyke (Caine) to his country pile, a “dead-tech, post-modernisitc bullshit house” (to quote Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna in HEAT) – minimalist and gadget-laden. Wyke has been made a cuckold of by his wife’s affair with Tindle, who now wants to marry his paramour. Wyke’s motivations in requesting a meeting are unnervingly ambiguous, to those who’ve not seen the original. For very little in essence has been altered, bar the ending – which feels forced in its apparent desire to be different to the source, in the same way as the Tim Burton’s awful PLANET OF THE APES remake. The game playing device of the original has been replaced with a surveillance motif that tries to be contemporary and relevant.
Caine’s performance is gripping due to his usual charisma, this time tinged with untrustworthy menace, and the experimental nature of his taking on the opposite role from the original where he played Tindle to Laurence Olivier’s Wyke. Production design is also a stand out; the eye-catching interiors are like porn for the Property Ladder-set. Law is unconvincing though, not up to his best performances in ROAD TO PERDITION and COLD MOUNTAIN. The original was about class, masculinity and vanity, a film more of its time than timeless. Those themes have only been superficially updated, instead of overhauled for a modern audience. The CCTV idea seems to be a prop rather than a metaphor, and the nature of celebrity barely touched upon. This is head-scratching as to why anyone but Caine would be involved. The remake frenzy currently gripping the multiplex, knowing no-end, is deeply frustrating.
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