When I heard that Kenneth Branagh was doing a remake of Sleuth, the interesting but overblown and somewhat asinine adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s play of the same name, brought to film in 1972 by director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, it seemed likely to be another Entirely Unnecessary Remake, like the Jude Law film of Alfie and all the silly remakes of 1970s and ’80s horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween.

Even more warning was the fact that since his first film, an excellent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V (itself an Entirely Unnecessary Remake of Lawrence Olivier’s impressive 1946 production), Branagh has done little that was interesting or even competent, either as an actor or as a director.

Plus there was the gimmick of casting Michael Caine, who had played the youngest of the three characters that populated the original film version, to play the oldest in this version, and that his replacement as the younger character would be prissy Jude Law, who had taken on Caine’s classic role in the recent Entirely Unnecessary Remake of Alfie.

Advance reports from Venice, where Branagh’s remake has just premiered in the city’s film festival, are that the movie just doesn’t work. The Hollywood Reporter review says it looks "great" and has some witty new lines from screenwriter Harold Pinter, but its attempt to go very "dark" in the third act falls flat.

That’s another silly trend among the pop-culture elite of our times, the idea that making things "dark" makes them more intelligent and artistic. It does not. It makes them more cliched and stupid, almost invariably. This is why people don’t go to see films like The Black Dahlia: such movies are boring and stupid.

The Hollywood Reporter critique observes, "The big names and a tight 86-minute running time also will help, but the film’s downbeat tone won’t encourage huge box office."

The Mankiewicz version strongly emphasized the class-warfare and Generation Gap issues so popular at the time, and Branagh’s EUR does the same, according to the Hollywood Reporter writeup, but evidently the filmmaker’s desire to make this one "deeper" and more intense than the earlier version just makes the entire thing obvious and vulgar:

Pinter produces some cracking lines of dialogue that Caine and Jude relish to the full. He even has Law ask: What’s it all about? The two actors deliver movie-star performances of the highest level, and their gamesmanship is hugely entertaining. Until, that is, the third set, when a grimmer mood takes over along with considerable homoerotic banter that seems to have little grounding and lacks wit.

"Sleuth" is the kind of film that should leave audiences with a wicked smiling shiver, but alas, that’s not the case.

What Branagh and his collaborators seem not to have realized is that the original film version was already plenty dark itself, in its themes and personal conflicts. The only way to top that would be to vulgarize it by making everything more obvious, and hence superficial, and hence less intellectually stimulating.

I’ll carve out some time to see the film when it arrives on our sparkling American shores, and will of course report on it then. For now, however, it seems likely that the new Sleuth exemplifies some thoroughly undesirable trends of our time.