REVIEWED - ALFIE: After de-gutting, political correction and a serious roughing-up by the style Gestapo, there is little else bar the title left of Lewis Gilbert's dark 1966 sex comedy. Had the new version been renamed into the bargain - nobody really calls himself Alfie any more, so it could have been - then what remains would only have been identifiable with recourse to dental records.
London has been replaced by the same graceless, prosaic New York that starred in Sex in the City and Michael Caine, wisely declining a cameo, has been stood down in favour of Jude Law, who offers further proof that, though quite brilliant at playing public school bullies, he just can't do loveable.
And, yes, loveable is what he is supposed to be. The blithely misogynistic Alfie, who referred to women as "it" and didn't allow a shocking glance of a backstreet abortion to seriously inhibit his style, is now a reasonably raffish FHM reader with - oh please don't make me say the words - commitment issues. Every 15 minutes or so, pausing between seductions of such women as Marisa Tomei (nice single mom) and Susan Sarandon (the older woman, something she seems to have been forever), Alfie will realise that he is doing the wrong thing with his life. Then off he will go again. I guess making the hero that bit nicer guards against accusations that the film-makers may be asking us to sympathise with a serious woman-hater, but it also scuppers any attempts at the amoral Jacobean humour which the first film (not really that good, to be honest) occasionally achieved.
What we are left with is ugly, ugly style. With its split-screens, its candied set-dressing and its absurdly empathetic camera filters, the picture, directed by the undistinguished Charles Shyer, who brought us Baby Boom and some other rubbish, looks like the sort of dream Joel Schumacher might have after eating too much cheese. And then there is Law's endless, supposedly charming nattering to the camera. Love a duck, if he stopped one more glottal at me I think I might have kicked his bleedin' teeth in. Knowaramean?
