Sleuth

This contemporary, high-tech reworking of Anthony Shaffer's puzzle of a play and its subsequent 1972 movie version is really more reinvention than remake. In fact, only two lines from the original have survived. Instead, Nobel Prize–winning playwright Harold Pinter has created his own dialogue to tell this biting tale of a cat-and-mouse game played behind closed doors by an older mystery writer (Michael Caine) who goes mano y mano with a young actor (Jude Law) who claims to have slept with his wife (who we never see). Matched evenly in a precisely choreographed game of wits, the two run around each other for 85 minutes engaging in verbal combat and hurling pointed barbs in an attempt to unnerve their opponent. Just when you think Caine has the upper hand, Law comes in for the kill, and vice versa. To avoid spoilers, we don't want to give away too much plot. Suffice it to say it all involves some divorce papers and an appetite for murder that takes twists and turns the audience is not supposed to see coming. The original took place in an old English manor house, but this version has been set in a gadgetized, surveillanced mausoleum of modern life that allows Caine a home-court advantage he eventually squanders. The movie, directed by actor Kenneth Branagh, is handsome enough, but for some reason just doesn't quite connect the dots, probably due to the fact that it is nearly 40 minutes shorter than the '72 version, which featured Caine in the Jude Law role and Laurence Olivier in the part now amusingly played by Caine. Both stars deliver, just not enough to make this seem like anything other than a pale imitation all dressed up with no place to go.