Film
SLEUTH Kenneth Branagh’s ferociously arty, vacuous version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play pares the action down to a slim two-hander: a famous English writer (Michael Caine) plays cat’s paw with his wife’s lover, a cocky arriviste played by that other Alfie, Jude Law—the role Caine had in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 filming. Handsomely appointed in gleaming glass and other fascist design accessories of the cold-hearted super-rich (the writer’s house looks like David Geffen’s mansion, with accessories by Escher), this tiresome rehash seems motivated by little more than the urge to bludgeon us with upper-case Cinema. Surveillance cameras rule, and verbal tennis ensues in clipped micro-clauses made over by screenwriter Harold Pinter, whose gift for terse opacity has rarely translated well onto the big screen. Whatever pleasure can be wrung from Sleuth lies in the black comedy of Caine and Law’s sinuous symbiosis. But in Branagh’s hands, Shaffer’s tired bromides about the potency of wealth and cunning, and the supposedly primal struggle of two males more in love with one another than with the woman they seek to possess, remain little more than a pissing contest energized by crude homophobia and misogyny. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
HITMAN Fresh from creating domestic cyber-anarchy in this summer’s Live Free or Die Hard, Timothy Olyphant goes global as top-flight international assassin Agent 47 in producer Luc Besson and director Xavier Gens’ bargain-basement adaptation of the titular videogame. Cut loose by his Orwellian parent organization (known only as “the organization”) after a supposedly botched hit on the Russian president, 47—who, despite his job’s evident needs for anonymity and stealth, sports an enormous barcode tattoo on the back of his bald head—hightails it across the former USSR in search of his betrayers while offering reluctant protection to a tempestuous prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) perplexed by the assassin’s paralyzing fear of intimacy. “You don’t want to fuck me and you don’t want to kill me—I’ve never felt so much indifference in my life,” she huffs. Olyphant, who made for the least menacing Die Hard baddie on record, furrows his brow and snarls his lines in an unconvincing bid to seem tough. And while Gens can splatter gore with the best of them—a human body packed with C4 goes off in graphic detail—he fails to stage so much as a single rousing action scene, even when he has four double-fisted swordsmen face off inside an abandoned subway car. Game over. You lose. —Scott Foundas (Now playing)
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