The Lucky Frown

Take a dazzling screenplay, give it to Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter to refresh, Academy Award-winner Kenneth Branagh to redirect, and the redoubtable Michael Caine and Jude Law to act out, and even offer the original Sleuth—a brilliant 1972 film starring Lawrence Olivier and Caine—as a benchmark and inspiration, and what happens? Well, to begin with, Harold Pinter rewrites the script without watching the original film. And thence unfurls a pageant of pomp and postmodernism that makes the second Sleuth self-destracing, forgettable, and—to adopt the language of its rewriter—shallow as piss.