'Sleuth' is a strange mash-up

In Kenneth Branagh's and Harold Pinter's very unnecessary reimagining of Anthony Shaffer's famed stage play "Sleuth," Michael Caine plays Andrew Wyke, a bestselling novelist who has invited to his mansion a callow young man named Milo Tindle, played by Jude Law.

Wyke's wife has recently fallen in love with Tindle, and Wyke has a strange plan for revenge against the unseen woman that involves a staged jewel heist and insurance fraud. Except nothing is quite as it seems -- and after a series of reversals and double-crosses, it soon becomes impossible to figure out who's enacting revenge on whom, and for what purpose.

All of this, of course, comes straight from the original play and subsequent 1972 film version, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Caine in the Tindle part. (Laurence Olivier played Wyke.) Mankiewicz's film was passably entertaining, but also hokey, overwrought and hoplelessly stage-bound -- you can't imagine why anyone would want to dust it off and try again. Perhaps accordingly, Branagh hasn't so much remade "Sleuth" as handed it over to the Nobel laureate Pinter, who melds his own high modernist style with Shaffer's more middlebrow melodramatics.

The result is a frequently bizarre stew that veers far off course from the original material: As Wyke and Tindle engage in one mind game after another, the movie degenerates into a form of Pinter-esque self-parody; the characters speaking in vague abstractions and clipped platitudes about absolutely nothing, until you have no idea what's supposed to be going on or why you're supposed to care.

Branagh, meanwhile, barely seems interested in the story, and instead focuses on giving us a guided tour of Wyke's gleaming, high-security house.

It's certainly unique to see two playwright's contrary sensibilities so awkwardly mashed together. But the movie plays like a theater experiment that never should have left the workshop.