Review: Sleuth

It’s almost tempting to recommend “Sleuth” for its trim, terse, vicious script by Harold Pinter, which retains almost nothing beyond the concept of Anthony Shaffer’s original play or the 1972 adaptation directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. “That sounds threatening.” “Does it?” “Doesn’t it?” But director Kenneth Branagh, as is his wont, muffs it with zeal. In both cases, it’s a two-hander between two men battling over the possession of an off-screen woman; in the new version, the older Michael Caine takes the Sir Larry mantel as the bestselling novelist Wyke, and a foppishly tressed Jude Law, as he did in the disastrous “Alfie,” slips into Caine’s loafers as “Milo Tindle.” The country estate of Caine’s successful novelist where the two match wits is like a cartoonish, muted rendition of the cement-heavy brutalist designs of Japanese architect Tadao Ando, but other tacky design elements, including disco-style lighting throughout the home, suggest less a failure of taste by Wyke than by the makers of this movie. There’s a lot to delight in, but the hamminess becomes suffocating well before the ending. “Never trust in love, chap, love would as soon kick you in the ass as look at you,” is a light version of the sweet vulgarization Pinter’s performed. “We fuck each other, that’s what people do,” Tindle tells Wyke. There’s elegant menace, but the failed direction wrecks the fun. Pinter’s cameo on a video screen is the wittiest touch the dreadful Branagh musters. There are zooms that could well have been enacted by Automavision, the camera software Lars von Trier designed to shoot “The Boss of It All.” In the spirit of Pinter’s vicious verbiage, “I have a feeling I’m a cunt” can only be answered by “You are a cunt.” 86m. (Ray Pride)