What's It All About, Alpha?

With Caine & Law, the 'Sleuth' Remake Is Just a Stylish Gimmick

Jude Law, fresh from the Michael Caine role in the "Alfie" remake, does the same here -- with Caine as the other lead. (By David Appleby -- Sony Pictures Classics)

"Sleuth" is the kind of production that arrives dripping with prestige and pedigree: The remake of the 1972 dark comedy stars Michael Caine and Jude Law, working from a new script by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and directed by Kenneth Branagh. That's all to the good, but once things get underway it quickly becomes apparent that "Sleuth," which was and is adapted from Anthony Shaffer's hit play, is little more than a sleek, stylish stunt.

The frisson here is that Caine, who played the young rake sleeping with the wife of a famous writer (the latter then played by Laurence Olivier), now plays the cuckolded author, a wily old geezer with a fondness for games and toys. In the earlier version, Andrew Wyke's house was full of creepy dolls, gimcracks and gewgaws; today, his English manor house is country only on the outside. Inside, it's all polished concrete and hard surfaces, a monument to high modernism abuzz with computerized surveillance equipment and mechanized luxuries.

The house in "Sleuth" is the third character in what really is a two-man show; the wife in question, Maggie, is seen only in an alluring life-size photograph with her decollete at its vanishing point. When Milo Tindle (Law) arrives to demand that Wyke give her the divorce she's been requesting, the gimlet-eyed elder statesman proposes staging a jewel theft that will satisfy all parties. That caper in turn leads to an escalating series of one-uppings on the part of two men whose obsessive passion for each other grows at every malevolent turn.

"Sleuth" is in fact a double-stunt, with Caine not only playing the character he once played against, but also playing against the very actor who's played him in recent years. The result is a kind of Alfie-to-Alfie (or is that alpha-to-alpha?) combat, as these two accomplished actors, playing equally crafty characters, engage in the kind of mirroring that is one of the visual leitmotifs of the film itself. As Wyke says at one point, "I'm you and you're me, get it?" Yes, we do.

With its striking layout and stark aesthetic, the house winds up generating more interest than the prolix nattering within its well-appointed walls (the production has been handsomely designed by Neil Farrell). It's never a good sign when the architecture generates more warmth than the people in it; if it weren't for the myriad tiny gas jets that fire Wyke's spectacular fireplace, there wouldn't be an authentic spark in the place. (The house might remind filmgoers of the weird, cavernous house in Stanley Kubrick's classic "Lolita," a much more satisfying exercise in unreliable narrative and pure acting chops.)

Instead, "Sleuth" gives us technique -- lots of it -- as Law and Caine encounter each other in a series of verbal jousts, each of them smart but without any real emotional stake. Law is well cast in a role that depends heavily on the actor's unsettling physical beauty, as the men's parries and thrusts take on an increasingly erotic (or pseudo-erotic) turn. And Caine is -- well, he's Michael Caine, and surely that's enough. He's incapable of putting a foot wrong (and a well-shod foot it is). Still, once the initial delight has passed, "Sleuth" turns out to be not the promised mind game but a tiresome tit-for-tat of sexual humiliation and brute force.

And we should care . . . why? "Sleuth" never answers that question to any degree of satisfaction, nor does it push its characters into confronting the changed terrain of gender politics of the 21st century. (Wyke still refers to his wife, without irony, as his possession.) "Sleuth" is happy to remain a pop-culture artifact, like one of the original Wyke's curios that the 2007 Wyke would no doubt consign to the rubbish bin. On its own sophisticated surface, "Sleuth" might promise to be an essentially harmonious little chamber piece, but it turns out to be a toxic and instantly forgettable bagatelle.

Sleuth (86 minutes, at Shirlington and Bethesda Row) is rated R for strong profanity.