Remake of 'Sleuth' has trouble finding itself

"Alfie" apparently failed to cure Jude Law of his need to be unfavorably compared to Michael Caine.

He resurrects a totemic Caine role again in the remake "Sleuth" and ups the stakes by appearing opposite Caine himself, who takes the role once occupied by Laurence Olivier.

Much has changed from 1972 original, but its structural essence is intact - a two-character piece built around the battle of wits between an apparently shallow young man and a sophisticated older gent.

Law is Milo, an out-of-work actor visiting the modernist country estate of a wealthy writer (Caine), trying to persuade the older man to drop his vendetta against his ex-wife, with whom Milo is shacked up.

Caine's character agrees to back off, provided Milo participates in an insurance fraud scheme by pretending to steal a valuable necklace. This is an obvious set-up: We know it, Milo knows it, but proceeds anyway, on the gambit that he can somehow outwit his host during the fake robbery.

Watching the two men go at it is meant to be fun, but "Sleuth" begins to feel increasingly walled-in and tedious. Director Kenneth Branagh gussies up the production by integrating his own showy interior shots with footage of the home's many surveillance cameras - the intimacy of a two-character gives way to the intrusion of a third character in the person of Branagh's overedited POV (it makes for a curiously long 88 minutes).

The actors also change the character of the piece. Law makes Milo needy, emotional, loud. His rival wants him out of the way, and after 20 minutes, so do we. We miss Caine and his wonderful economy. On the other hand, while this may be sacrilegious to say, the unflappable Caine is a big improvement on Olivier, who was fussy and frantic in the original.

In the end, though, the movie is too much a consideration of what Law is doing, or Caine, or Branagh, or dialogue so Pinteresque it was actually rewritten by Harold Pinter. The movie never achieves anything like a life of its own. *

Produced by Jude Law, Kimon Halfon, Tom Sernberg, Marion Pilowsky, Kenneth Branagh, Simon Oseley, directed by Kenneth Branagh, written by Harold Pinter, music by Patrick Doyle, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.