Get Carter

A mob enforcer goes back to his native Seattle to sort out the suspicious death of his brother.

The original film is one of the best English thrillers of all time and despite being made nearly thirty years ago still packs a punch. Sadly this film is not really in its league, despite a bigger budget and more ground coverage.

The main problem is that the authors clearly love the original and this leaves so much of what happens as a question mark to the new viewer. Characters are thrown in from nowhere and Carters involvement with his bosses' girl is almost in another movie. Micheal Caine's small role (as a barman) is funny in that he was the original Jack Carter, here reprised by Sly Stallone.

While quick to admit this is mediocre stuff you have to say that you get your share of car chases (well done too), fights, creeps, sleaze, family bonding, shoot outs and even the odd bit of light humour. The fight between Stallone and Mickey Rouke (here playing a buisnessman-stroke-creep) for example.

This film features interesting cinematography, with strange forward jump cuts (ripped off from The Limey), odd angles and the use of colour filters. In short, the producers trying to make more out of the material than is in the script. The choice of a wet Seattle is also curious and different. Presumably the nearest to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (the setting of the original) that the producers could think of.

So it is only an average product, but will see much worse than this in our lifetime and it does move along at a fair and steady clip. People are getting to knock Stallone for being Stallone, but he doesn't do bad a job here, a stonefaced enforcer that is prepared to shed a tear when needs be! Not great acting, but he looks the part.

Don't be put off by the low IMDB ratings, plenty of worthy films are two or three points higher but are far more boring. Popcorn fodder it may be, but I thought it was worth seeing through and even declared myself modestly entertained at the end of it. Not as good as the original but not a lot is.

Footnote: This is actually not the first remake of Get Carter. A blackspolitation version was made in the 1970's called "Hitman."

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

Approximately 1/10th as good as the original, this version of GET CARTER doesn't even have the courage to use the original ending. And it is edited in today's hyper-trendy style using extremely brief shots edited together in a welter of images hoping to create an impression of kinetic action. Instead, it's just indecipherable chaos.

Stallone tries his best, but his mustache and goatee have the odd effect of squeezing his lips together increasing his resemblance to a fish. He's also saddled with long, boring scenes with his niece (or maybe she's his daughter) that really don't lead anywhere. This has a different main villain than the original, but it's hardly a surprise since Mickey Rourke's character gives it away in his first scene. (But what happens to Mickey Rourke later? If he's dead, why wasn't there some kind of reaction from the numerous bystanders?) Stallone needs to forget about the audience liking him, and go for the realism of the character, but he never, never will show that kind of imagination and integrity.

Showy, trendy junk.

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

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).