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RATING:  
Thievery, shear-sharp dialogue by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter and antagonists who use pauses, not purple prose, to emasculate.
Add to that the award-winning combined forces of British film royalty and you would expect Kenneth Branagh's (Hamlet) remake of Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1972's Sleuth (based upon Anthony Schaeffer's 1970 Tony Award-winning play) to be a masterpiece in the making.
It isn't.
The legendary Michael Caine was a ripe young actor who wowed critics when his performance as hairdresser/part-time actor Milo Tindle kept up with the great Laurence Olivier's successful mystery novelist Andrew Wyke in the 1972 version.
Thirty-six years later, Caine is now Wyke and Jude Law (also the shoe-filler of Caine's breakout role in 2004's Alfie) is Tindle.
In his seduction of Wyke's wife, Tindle precipitates a deadly duel of wits between the two, which begins as a cerebral one-upmanship but promptly escalates towards the fatal.
It is this very interplay, using Pinter's minimalist brand of cruel words and absurdist fun, that keeps the film's engine running.
But this slow-burning dance of deception, which shines with brilliant acting and stylish modern mise-en-scene, eventually feels like a collection of wasted highly-talented resources, heightening the gimmicky quotient in the film's strained reliance on its own cleverness.
It's all too smart for its own good, which is why the theatrical anticipation of the thriller aspect unfortunately never ignites and in the final 15 minutes, the story completely falls apart — diminishing the overall effect and is left with nowhere to go.
Even the implied idea of Caine and Law almost playing out the insinuated homoeroticism cannot save the ending, however shocking that might sound. - TODAY/ra
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