Get Carter

A remake of the 1971 film with Michael Caine.

Las Vegas mob enforcer Jack Carter travels to Seattle to investigate his brother's mysterious death. Local crime lords want him out, but Carter unrelentingly proceeds in finding the truth.

Starting with a promising beginning (though it remains amusing that someone thought that Stallone can match Caine's acting) the film soon slumps into a bad case of mediocrity. It has the same idea as the original and tries to be as badass with its kinetic and almost experimental direction, but ends up being just poor. Stallone's Carter is given an almost soft side that goes complete against the character from the first film. On top of that there are some enjoyable car chases, but they serve as sensationalism that was critically lacking from the first film.

Then there is the ending, which has some merit (since the film already establish Carter as softer then the original), but even so, it is still pretty stupid and leaves the film with little to say or resonate with. That ultimately makes this is second rate crime movie that you might enjoy, but don't count it. --- 5/10

Rated R for violence and profanity

I can't believe the critics this movie gets here. I hated Stallone as Rambo, as Rocky and I love him in this role. And even if you have seen the 1971 original, not everyone can remember all the details - at least I couldn't. (I think there is just about two or three movies about Jesus, and nobody cares about the remakes). Stallone is out to take vengance on the murderers of his brother, a decent barman working to support his family. The story takes place in seattle, and as you can imagine, there are a couple of shootings, car chases and so on. But that's not the movie. The movie is the fight from a bad guy against the bad guys to get justice for someone who didn't do anything wrong. The movie has an extraordinary visual quality, the titles and the music are worth seeing and hearing this movie. And one very seldom quality at the end: This movie is not to long. Get Carter! 7 of 10!

Sylvester Stallone's remake of the British classic GET CARTER has gone down in history as one of the biggest flops and worst remakes ever. Watching it now, I can see why; it's a completely forgettable film that might just pass muster as an average straight-to-video thriller but which feels like a catastrophe when compared to the original.

The problems with this film are myriad, but most noticeably missing is the sense of location. GET CARTER made excellent use of its northeastern locations, whereas this remake just has an ordinary Seattle backdrop that looks like a hundred other thrillers from the era. It's not one of Stallone's finest performances either; he looks constipated throughout the production, which is a surprise given that he'd made the excellent COP LAND fairly recently which had contained one of his greatest performances.

The casting of Michael Caine in a crucial role just reinforces how tedious and average this thriller is. Sure, the plot is fast paced, but the direction is hollow and the action sequences feel sub-par, somehow. I notice that director Stephen Kay has wisely stuck to television fare after the double whammy disaster of this and BOOGEYMAN (which was even worse).

By far, the most entertaining moment on the DVD of "Get Carter" is the hilariously outdated 1971 theatrical preview for the original version of the film, which starred Michael Caine. (Caine does appear in this Stallone update.) Sadly, this update stinks. Sylvester Stallone's Jack Carter, a Las Vegas button man, skips town without his boss's permission and heads up to his old stomping grounds in Seattle to investigate the mysterious death of his brother, whom he hasn't seen in five years. That's the pitch.

The action is surprisingly restrained and impressionistic. For example, when one of the minor bad guys gets killed, we see the result of a headlong plunge but not the actual slaying. But this kind of restraint doesn't dovetail with the promise of the previews: an ass-kicking Stallone in a Rat Pack suit. The director tries to gloss over the many plot holes with slick, faux-Fincher cuts and zooms, but he's just covering.

Here's the tragedy. Action-thrillers don't require good acting, but they sure are enhanced by it. Most of the actors in "Get Carter" have the ability to far outshine this genre, much the way the actors in 1998's "Ronin" did-within the context of the plot, the cast of "Ronin" delivered their lines with utter conviction.

Not necessarily so here. Those stars in "Get Carter" who have real talent weren't used enough, and those who don't have the strongest dramatic chops were given boatloads of screen time. Sly is wooden at times (as per usual), but has some fine moments.

Miranda Richardson, as Carter's widowed sister-in-law, is solid, but underutilized. Mickey Rourke, as an internet porn purveyor, has obviously been working out some more, but it's still apparent that he peaked in "Diner." The big surprise was just how much actual characterization they allowed Rachael Leigh Cook--as Carter's bereaved niece--to show off. Any one of these actors, given enough on-screen opportunity, might have saved "Get Carter" from its ridiculous plot holes and incongruities. But they didn't. Do yourself a favor: avoid this film.

The central figure of this film, Jack Carter, is a Las Vegas gangster who returns to his roots in Seattle following the death of his brother. This was officially reported as an accident, but Jack suspects that his brother may have been murdered by members of the local criminal underworld. The film charts Jack's attempts to find out the truth and to take revenge.

This is, of course, a good example of Hollywood's cannibalising of the British and European film industries in its endless search for a good story. It is a remake of Mike Hodges's classic from 1971, one of the few great British gangster films. That film was one that grew out of, and yet at the same time transcended, a particular place and time, the North-East of England in the early seventies. This was a time of rapid social change in Britain, marked by increasing social mobility, growing permissiveness and relative prosperity, elements all reflected in the film. Like many of the best British films, it had a strong sense of place. Its fidelity to a real time and place was not a weakness but a strength, helping to establish it firmly in the realm of reality and to convey its major theme, the sterility and futility of the criminal lifestyle. Its view of the underworld acted as a necessary antidote to the tendency, very prevalent in the late sixties and early seventies, to glamorise criminals ("The Thomas Crown Affair), sentimentalise them ("The Italian Job") or mythologise them ("The Godfather").

Stephen Kay's film attempts to establish a similar sense of place to the original; the Seattle we see has a bleak, forbidding atmosphere, always shrouded in rain or mist. It has a much more star-studded cast than the original, with at least one reasonably good performance from a convincingly thuggish Mickey Rourke. Despite this, however, it is a far inferior film when compared with the original. The main reason is the way in which the character of Jack Carter has been changed. Michael Caine's Carter was, for all his sharp suits and fast cars, no more than a ruthless street thug, a poor boy made bad at a time when other poor boys were making good. Sylvester Stallone's character, by contrast, may have a rough exterior (Stallone plays him as outwardly impassive, with a gruff, emotionless voice) but beneath it he is one of the good guys. The plot has been rewritten to make Carter less brutal and ruthless and to allow him to survive at the end. The original was a morality play on (as another reviewer has pointed out) the theme of "those who live by the sword shall die by the sword". The remake is simply a revenge thriller with a hero whom the audience can root for.

This illustrates one of the perils of the remake. Kay's film has kept the title, the bare outlines of the plot and even some of the names of the characters, but completely fails to capture the spirit of the original. Moreover, it is unable to replace that spirit with anything new. If the film-makers had wanted to make an exciting goodie-versus-baddies revenge thriller, they could have chosen a better starting-point than the plot of a film made some thirty years earlier with a very different aim in mind.

It has become something of a tradition for remakes to feature cameo appearances by the stars of the original films. Martin Scorsese's "Cape Fear", for example, featured no fewer than three actors who had appeared in the earlier J. Lee Thompson version, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam. That, however, was a rare example of a remake that we as good as, or even better than, the original. Kay's "Get Carter", however, is not in the same class as Hodges's. It was, therefore, rather disappointing to see Michael Caine appearing in a remake that can only diminish one of his best films. 4/10