[col-sect][column]Sleuth 2007, is a serious disappointment (except for the music). I watch it at home every once in a while, even though I don’t like it; I keep thinking that maybe this time it won’t suck or that this time I’ll realize how clever it truly is. It never really works out that way, but i’ll try a couple more times.

The last time I watched, I had this brilliant idea for how it could have been really interesting: instead of re-setting the film with Michael Caine cast as Andrew Wyke, the role that Lawrence Olivier played opposite Caine in the 1972 adaptation of the play – which is kind of a cute move – how about leaving Caine in his original role as Milo Tindle, but just thirty-five years later. You feeling this? Ah yes. And the play then becomes a kind of “that’s what you get for seducing another man’s wife” story, a very patient kind of poetic justice.

You’re saying, “Patrick you dumb-ass, Milo got killed in the finale of the original so how can be go on to be in this second installment?” And I say, “Not nececellery.” Milo got shot and certainly appears to have died, but come on, he was shot in the back. You could easily explain away this minor inconvenience with Milo’s anticipation that Wyke would shoot him as a result of the truly perfectly planned and executed triple-layered revenge game that Milo had devised and subjected Wyke to, leaving him no choice but to attempt murder; hence the reason why he had put on and worn a bullet-proof vest prior to the shooting! Yes! And the original film simply closes before this information is revealed.

Do you see now how much cooler this is? Of course you do. Because you recognize the potential. This is how it works, picking up from the final scene of the original: the cops up come through the door to see Tindle on the floor and Wyke with the smoking gun in his hand. Wyke is caught red-handed but stammers to explain, knowing that his explanation (that he thought Tindle was a thief) is not going to fly. Tindle playing dead on the floor, lets Wyke twist in the wind until the cuffs are on him. [/column][column]Satisfied that the game is done, Tindle finally gets up and may or may not press charges for attempted murder. Tindle goes on to acquire a bit of fame and notoriety in the press as the young fellow who was shot (yet survived) by the famous mystery writer Andrew Wyke. Then like the opportunistic gentleman that we know him to be, he leverages his brief 15 minutes in the sun to his own advantage. He writes a television drama based on the event and plays himself! Awesome. Further entrenching his cult of personality.

He ends up making a fortune in the entertainment business, catering to the very audience that Wyke despised: average folk and through the medium that Wyke did not approve of: television. What the new film missed was that the original story was really about a cultural change in values; character was the vehicle through which to express the conflict that England was going through at the time: Wyke represented the old british meritocrical tradition; Tindle represented the refreshed values of the still idealistic revolution. So the sting of Tindle’s succes to Wyke is so much more poignant if that success was acquired serving the “ignoble minds” of the middle classes through television.

So Caine stays in character, but like much of the idealism of the 60’s, eventually grew up into yuppism and then whatever it is now, mutual fund holding, Audi-driving, Botox-taking grandparents, Tindle also migrates in this direction and adopts characteristics of the privileged classes. He becomes like Wyke. He marries a much younger woman who loves him for his money. He has a mistress; he over-romantizes the ideals of his generation’s past. The damage caused to him as the victim of Wyke’s cruel game way back in ‘72 has changed him for life. He now also becomes obsessed with games of humiliation, and so we pick up the action in the new film when his wife takes interest in a younger man, say an actor. Tindle now devises a revenge game of his own to humiliate this young man, whose values of course perfectly oppose his own. As the drama unfolds, the cycle of abuse continues.[/column][/col-sect]

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