Updated ‘Sleuth’ a deliciously nasty game of cat and mouse

In the 1972 film “Sleuth,” a hammy chamber piece based on a play by Anthony Shaffer, a young hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) arrives at the costume- and prop-stuffed manse of aging crime novelist Andrew Wyke (played with cuckoo brio by Laurence Olivier), who greets him as “the man who wants to marry my wife.” In the remake, Jude Law plays Tindle, and Caine, who plays Wyke, greets him as “the man who’s … my wife.” Tindle chokes on his Scotch but the gleam in his eye could light a stadium. “She’s … me,” he replies, with the mock disingenuousness of a smart-alecky fifth-grader. In this battle royal between sex and money, there’s no trace of the initial decorum of the original, which had Milo painfully lay out his humble origins and polish his bootstrap bona fides for Wyke’s inspection. This time, the cat-and-mouse game is played by a couple of weasels. Which is a lot more like it.

Directed by Kenneth Branagh from an updated script by Harold Pinter, the theatrics have been considerably toned down, and the action unfolds in a cooler, darker, more slinkily malevolent place– namely, the concrete-and-laser-beam atrocity that is Wyke’s country house. Milo is no longer a hairdresser (though Andrew keeps insisting he is) but an out-of-work actor specializing, as he says, in killers, sexual deviants and perverts. Wyke, for his part, is no longer an Agatha Christie type but the manly churner-outer of sleek, bestselling thrillers with titles like “Rat in a Trap.”

Set within Wyke’s lugubrious bunker, which is outfitted with more surveillance cameras than chairs, “Sleuth” has a tendency to let its theatrical underpinnings show. Things get a bit stagy, and the act reversals yield diminishing returns. The final twist in particular takes the movie in an interesting but unconvincing direction, not because it’s not credible but because it hinges on reserves of trust and credulousness that characters this quick-witted and cynical would have thoroughly exhausted by then. Still, the verbal sparring is so sharp it’s a wonder nobody loses an eye. Caine is infinitely more effective – and appealing – as the heavy-lidded python waiting for the moment to strike, and Law couldn’t be more snide and slippery. Language this lethal has all but disappeared from the movies, and it’s an unmitigated pleasure to observe Caine and Law attack it with such ferocity. “Sleuth” is nasty fun.

 carina.chocano@latimes.com

“Sleuth.” MPAA rating: R for strong language. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes. In limited release.