Poor Kenneth Branagh an undervalued director if ever there was one is likely to receive far more blame than he deserves for the way this turned out. To be sure, he must have signed off on the tacky, minimalist set design (maybe this would work, or seem to work, if you saw the movie on TV) which in turn forced him into a series of count-the-pores close-ups in order to get away from the bare surfaces and garish lighting. But this set basically echoes, admittedly in the most simple-minded possible way, the minimalist, engineered-rather-than-written screenplay which Harold Pinter manufactured out of Anthony Schaffer's vastly superior original. Schaffer's version was a stage firecracker, and so perhaps if looked at in the cold light of day it is a little mechanical and formulaic; but Pinter's re-working of the material is ten times more mechanical and formulaic; the chief difference is that there's no firecracker: Pinter doesn't want to run the risk of giving us something to enjoy. He seems to think the goal of black comedy is to mortify our flesh and dull our intellect.
Michael Caine is magnificent, but a large part of that magnificence consists in his ability to turn Pinter's stop-and-start dialogue into a performance of any kind, let alone a good one. How hard this task is can be seen by looking at Jude Law, who, without bad acting or any obvious misjudgement, utterly fails to do so.
Michael Caine is magnificent, but a large part of that magnificence consists in his ability to turn Pinter's stop-and-start dialogue into a performance of any kind, let alone a good one. How hard this task is can be seen by looking at Jude Law, who, without bad acting or any obvious misjudgement, utterly fails to do so.