Thirty-five years after Michael Caine played the role of crass boy-toy Milo Tindle in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's hit play Sleuth, the actor takes over his 1972 co-star Laurence Olivier's role of rich cuckold Andrew Wyke in Kenneth Branagh's updated remake of the same story. Where Olivier brought a seething, upper-class disgust to mystery-novelist Wyke's attitude toward Tindle--who is having an affair with the former's wife and has come to the writer's mansion to request that Wyke divorce her--Caine basks in the comic absurdity of a superficial man like Tindle (Jude Law) led by the nose into one or another illusion of happiness. The new film's script by Harold Pinter has the arid air of expectation familiar to his work, the weight of things not said whenever someone speaks. That's a considerable weight indeed, in Sleuth's story of a psychological contest between two very different men who despise one another beneath outward civility.

The story finds Tindle arriving at Wyke's home. Following various small humiliations, he is invited by the older man to steal his wife's jewels in a scheme that benefits everyone. There's more than meets the eye to Wyke's proposal, however, leading to unexpected developments and surprises in the film's second half. Branagh's direction is suitably cool and sleek in the beginning, when the characters' emotions are still in check and the oddness of Wyke's gadget-filled world is still entertaining to behold. (The film's set design is one of its strongest elements.) But once voices rise and threats appear and the like, Branagh can't seem to penetrate the surface of things. Unlike Mankiewicz's take, the new version is caught up in the insularity of the characters' tit-for-tat gamesmanship, lacking the intriguing, class-warfare subtext of the earlier work. A gay angle thrown into the last half-hour sits uncomfortably and irrelevantly with the rest of the material. The best thing about this Sleuth are the performances of Law and Caine, who could have been even better with a great script. --Tom Keogh