I really didn’t think that this would or could be anything but a curious watch as the pale comparison to the recent (and in my opinion outstanding) Tony Scott version of the same story. But for at least its first hour, it’s actually a lot better than expected, and bears a lot more similarities to the more recent adaptation too – I really thought the whole set-up had been changed a lot more by Brian Helgeland in his updated screenplay. There are big changes, don’t get me wrong, but the similarities, right down to little things even like costumes and set design, are often surprising.

Something had led me to believe the girl in this version was much older, something I always thought would take away a lot of the power of Scott’s version. But Jade Malle, who plays the girl here – 12-year-old Sam, not 9-year-old Pita as played by Dakota Fanning in the 2004 version – really looks the part more than I’d thought she would. Malle looks incredibly like Natalie Portman in Leon – and while it’s easy to criticise her performance (it is a little wooden sometimes), I think it’s as much if not more to do with the way her character is written (that is, badly) that makes the emotional connection between her and Creasy, though not entirely absent, never match the sheer beauty of that found in the 2004 movie.

It’s in the second half, the “revenge” segment in the remake, where this version really loses its way and I think it’s down to that key turning point, which I won’t detail here, which is handled so perfectly in Scott’s movie but which doesn’t even exist in this one. The action set-pieces – again though they never do, never could match those in the remake – are much larger than I’d anticipated, but this doesn’t really make up for the fact that the movie is losing its way and fast. The whole resolution is dealt with far too quickly and the movie as a whole is often difficult to follow even for someone who pretty much knows the story already. Still, it’s an interesting watch for anyone who loved the 2004 movie, and I’ll probably take the next step back and read the novel now.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 12:55 am in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.