Alfie

Synopsis: Jude Law re-conceives Michael Caine’s iconic 1966 role as a playboy cockney limo driver on the streets of Manhattan, often wooing lonely female clients or anyone else that’s handy. Conquests include Julie (Maris Tomei) - single mum and “semi-permanent-quasi-sort-of-girlfriend”, Liz (Susan Sarandon) - sexy older female version of himself, Lonette (Nia Long) – his best man’s girlfriend and Nikki (Sienna Moore) – an exceptionally poorly cast ‘showstopper’. Will he let love in? [Charles Shyer, 2004, USA, rating: M, running time: 103 minutes]

I knew this was going to be a stinker within the first few minutes. Was it the swaggering sexual arrogance of Jude Law’s character? The absurd objectification of women? The sinking feeling that I had better things to do with my time? All of the above.

There is not much to like about this film’s characters, its tired take on sex and the city, or its resort to the odd cinematic device in an attempt to liven things up. The plot punches wind up so slowly that you have plenty of time to move out of the way and get some sustenance from the candy bar. The film tries to rewrite itself as it goes along, desperately trying to find a way out of a fairly meaningless story in which it’s hard to give a damn. It careens from superficiality to sentimentality, from heavy symbolism to meaninglessness, from one attempt to another to give you some reason to forgive the film’s manipulative efforts to give Alfie a redemption he doesn’t really seem to deserve and that you won’t care whether he gets or not.

The film could have worked. The trouble is that Jude’s character starts from a point of emotional development fairly similar to that of his love robot in Spielberg’s A.I. The film’s endpoint is just too distant from that beginning to make his character’s journey very credible. Things happen to Alfie in a vacuum of identity, where no hint is given as to where he’s come from, why he is as he is. We needed more of such material in order to believe in where he’s going and as it is, there’s just too much confusion about what the message is, how it’s told, and who it’s for.

1.5 flims.