If anything it seemed even more watered down and wildly, wildly miscast.
Some films leave you pondering what you've just seen long after the last image fades, and so it is with Rowan Joffe's remake of Brighton Rock. Unfortunately the questions it leaves you with are What on Earth did he think he was doing? What was the casting director smoking? and just plain Why? Updated to the 1960s for no discernible reason other than the director presumably not being able to get the remake rights to Quadrophenia but wanting to make a film with Mods and Rockers in it anyway and shot mostly in Eastbourne (though admittedly parts of Brighton have been heavily modernised over the past couple of decades), it's got more in common with the slew of dismal post-Lock, Stock run of Mockney gangster movies than Grahame Greene's immorality play. The Boulting Brothers generally superb version with Richard Attenborough did suffer heavily at the hands of the censors - Pinky's disfiguring bottle of vitriol became a less threatening switchblade - but rather than filling in the gaps this is an object lesson in missing the point. Where that had a convincing post-War milieu where the lack of parental guidance during the war years had led to an increase in juvenile crime, this offers us two leads who are way too old for their roles and consequently look a bit slow rather than presumptuous.
Andrea Risebrough at least looks a bit younger than her 29 years but unfortunately comes across as a congenital idiot rather than an innocent - her behaviour never seems credible for a grown woman in the 60s - but Sam Riley is catastrophic casting as Pinky: uncharismatic, unthreatening and making an even less convincing teenager than any of the cast of Grease, he leaves a complete void at the center of the film in a performance that leaves no cliche unturned and is frightening only in its blandness. It's hard to see him threatening a granny on pension day let alone a bunch of grown men or having the ability to woo the unwitting witness to a murder. Despite the odd superficial nod to the Catholicism that drives the novel - more the odd bit of Mafia flick imagery than a driving force of determined rebellion - it seems to miss the point on an epic scale, rather like a student who knows he'll lose points if he doesn't mention it in his book report but doesn't understand what it's there for. The supporting cast offer the kind of uninspired professionalism you get on misfired prestige TV dramas, only underlining the feeling that this is one of those misjudged TV shows that sit on the shelf for months before creeping out one weekend when no-one is looking, which pretty much describes its UK cinema release. Still, after his father Roland Joffe's infamously bad adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, you could at least say that Rowan Joffe is definitely following in his footsteps, making his being hired to rewrite the previously promising Agent Zigzag for Mike Newell look like the kiss of death for what could have been a terrific movie. With his gift for missing the point, he'll probably set the true WW2 story in the Korean War so he can include some rock'n'roll on the soundtrack.
"Security - release the badgers."
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