The tables turn, of course, and turn again, and thanks to Pinter’s abbreviated screenplay the swerves are frequently sharp. Both Wyke and Tindle show they can shift from snarling to sniveling in 90 seconds flat, and then back again if need be. The pity is that there aren’t many emotional gradations in between. The overheated interactions that characterize Pinter’s screenplay can be a necessity in live theatre, where a half-smile or quiet comment may not be evident to the folks back in row W. But having Jude Law alternate between grinning like the Joker and sobbing like a Greek tragedian is an unnecessary (and unwelcome) indulgence on the big screen. It’s not merely that this new Sleuth resembles a play (so did the original, after all), it’s that it resembles exactly the kind of play--over-determined, under-dramatized, self-serious--that causes so very many people not to like plays.
Branagh’s direction hardly helps matters. Befitting his time on the other side of the camera, Branagh has typically been content to give his actors space to do their thing. Here, however, perhaps egged on by Pinter’s excesses, he intrudes with uncharacteristic audacity. The result is a primer in pretension: The far-too-close close-ups, the showy shots from directly above or through venetian blinds, the promiscuous use of surveillance-camera “footage,” the peculiar lighting effects. (Is there any conceivable reason Wyke’s lights would be programmed to project twirling pinwheels on houseguests?)
It’s all a tremendous waste of Sleuth’s celebrated performers. Given the opportunity, Caine has shown himself more capable of conveying a kind of understated evil than perhaps any other actor of his generation. In the addictively sleazy Get Carter, for instance, or Neil Jordan’s marvelous Mona Lisa, Caine deadens his gaze, draining his features of any hint of human empathy. But Sleuth is far too unruly to permit such subtle effects, and Caine’s inevitably hammy performance is one he’ll likely want to forget. Law has yet to show that he’s capable of such onscreen malignity--in the comparably nasty Closer, Clive Owen ran circles around him--but he, too, is better in a minor key. Worse, he fails to pull off the crucial deception of the second act (at least to my eyes, though perhaps not to those that have never seen the original and thus aren’t aware of the coming twist).
Which brings us to the film’s greatest misstep, Pinter’s new third act. It is both obvious and obtuse, throwing psychological plausibility to the wind and, once again, making the implicit thuddingly, boringly explicit. (Among other shortcomings, it probably merits a phone call from the attorneys of whoever owns the rights to 1982’s Deathtrap, another small-cast whodunit based on a stage play in which Michael Caine plays a mystery writer with rather ambivalent ardors.) In its way, however, it’s a fitting conclusion to this flabby film. Sleuth is that most irritating of cinematic species, a hackneyed movie that thinks it’s risqué, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.