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Starring Michael Caine, Jude Law
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Sleuth (1972) let loose two vicious men whose sense of propriety was, at
the very least, limited. Andrew Wyke was landed gentry; Milo Tindle was the
immigrant upstart who stole his wife. A battle of wills ensued in which revenge
would be served cold and bitter.
Thirty years later, Kenneth Branagh updates
the film. Soft furnishings have been replaced by cold, steely interiors, and language
that was once elegant is decidedly pithy, when it’s not brutally ugly.
Harold
Pinter rewrote the original screenplay and his Sleuth is nothing if not Pinteresque. His sharp, twisting, circular
prose is funny, erudite and mean. He’s distilled a 140 minute feature into 87
succinct minutes of malice. Therein lies the film’s strength and weakness.
Received as either Branagh’s bastard child
or a wondrous delight for those who revel in the art of language, it polarises
audiences. Both are correct. As a remake, it fails miserably; a conceited
affair for luvvie-lovers who wallow in the campery of perplexing, ridiculous
protagonists. As a reworking, Pinter and Branagh delight in verbal jousts that
start with penis comparison; and size, as we know, matters. So who’s screwing
who, or are they screwing each other? There’s the question, the pleasure and
the pain.
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