Alfie review

Compared to the two recent remakes of Michael Caine movies, Alfie falls somewhere in-between: not as bad as the terrible Get Carter and not as good as the surprisingly enjoyable Italian Job. The trouble with remaking Alfie, however, is that it's a film that could really only have worked in the 60s. Its timing, along with the nascent arrival of women's lib, gave it the power to shock: with Caine famously referring to his conquests as 'it' and the portrayal of the taboo subject of abortion giving it an edge that made it one of the decade's more memorable British films. It didn't matter that the most beautiful man in the world wasn't in the lead role: part of Alfie's undeniable charm was Caine's unorthodox look, his famous droopy eyelids giving him an anti-leading man bravura.

Needless to say the updated version does star the world's most beautiful man and the movie is built around Jude Law's on-screen charisma. He certainly has it in bucketloads, giving him the ability to remove knickers at fifty paces. But outside of his cocky charm, this is a sanitised update: instead of there being an edge to the film, we are presumably meant to laugh along at the cheeky cockney's antics around town.

The trouble is that it soon becomes clear that this Alfie is a bit of a prat. Living alone with few friends, he is a commitment-phobe who learns new words like resilience from the dictionary and applies them to his daily life. The film is now set in New York, where 911 may never have happened, and pretty Muslim girls will wink at you from behind their burkhas. We follow the predatory Alife through a series of whirlwind relationships that all inevitably end in some sort of crisis. Marisa Tomei play s a young mother who increasingly sees Alfie's visits for what they are - callous booty calls. He gets his best (and only) friend's girlfriend (Nia Long) pregnant after a drunken encounter, and the subsequent issue of abortion is skirted over. He meets a rich older woman (Susan Sarandon) who may be playing him at his own game, and the one relationship in which a girl (Sienna Miller) actually moves in is depicted unconvincingly through a photo montage sequence.

Billed as stylish, sophisticated and sexy, the truth is that 2004's Alfie is a bit of a sap, with even less depth than Bridget Jones or any of the Sex and the City characters which the film tries to play against. It's also notably short on laughs and has a tone that veers unevenly between comedy that never quite hits the mark and melodrama that fails to convince. Director Charles Shyer was previously responsible for The Parent Trap, Father of the Bride and Baby Boom and his new film shares a similarly comfortable American cleanliness. Caine fans will have to wait until the proposed remake of Sleuth, rumoured to star Law and Caine himself, to see if the quality control improves.