In the middle of Sleuth, a three-act drama about a rich man and his cuckolder toying with each other in an airless lair, Jude Law and Michael Caine go toe-to-toe over the name of Law’s character, Tindle:

Law: Tindalini… He’s Italian… Or perhaps Tandoori.

Caine: Of the Bombay Tandooris?

This Kenneth Branagh film is great theater, a tense, stagey deathmatch between two scenery-chewing adversaries. Law, who’s already acted the sexbot, doesn’t exactly play a bi-toy with biceps. Instead he impersonates a capricious, hair-tossing female vamp, caressing his mouth with the barrel of a gun.

The movie’s second act is an ode to kukri knives and costume prosthetics, and any movie which relies this much on surveillance video runs the risk of becoming an upmarket Sliver. Some of Harold Pinter’s language is dated, but mostly it crackles. Law’s role in particular is catnip for those with dramatic range. He’s clearly enjoying himself here. The pleasingly symmetrical story arc reveals in the end the real reason for the rich man’s anomie.

Many reviewers complained of contrivance…

The performers tend to deliver the airless, self-consciously synthetic dialogue like untutored violinists dutifully sawing away to the steady tick-tock of a metronome. On occasion there’s a flourish of realism as one or the other approximates a human being rather than a dramatic contrivance. [Link]

… Branagh mines the dialogue and the setup for every theatrical and homosexual intimation that could possibly be revealed in its subtext. It’s the blatant homoerotic scenes near the tail-end that sends this deviously cold concept off the rails into lunacy… The movie ultimately veers from deeply involved to condescendingly absurd. [Link]

A musty scene of Law’s ostensibly sinister homosexual vamping suggests that Pinter hasn’t gotten out much lately. [Link]

Quite at home as the callow, out-of-work actor in the first half, Law feels increasingly ill at ease in what’s fundamentally a Pinter play on camera, with no ear for the music of the playwright’s precisely clipped yet real-sounding dialogue. [Link]

In Sleuth, [playwright Anthony Shaffer] created a Chinese-box plot that on the surface was a very theatrical mystery, but at heart was a parable of sexual envy and English class hatred…

… the final victim is…the viewer… if you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year. [Link]

Pinter and Branagh have apparently decided to turn the whole exercise.. into a sadomasochistic intergenerational encounter… you could describe the running contest between Andrew and Milo as a series of rape-like violations, designed to determine which of them is the real man, and which of them the bitch. (Andrew’s first exclamation is, “Well, I’ll be buggered!” Milo responds, “Exactly.”) …

… it possesses no level of psychological reality at all, unless you want to argue that these two cretinous closet-cases deserve to be trapped in the same universe… they never quite get around to taking their clothes off. [Link]

… but ’synthetic’ is the whole point. This is high-wire dialogue. It’s not about plot, it’s about lexical possibilities:

‘I understand you’re f-ing my wife,” goes one of the many curare-tipped dialogue darts in Sleuth… Pinter’s inimitable barbs fly swift and true… “Are you all right in elevators?” “I thought Maggie said you were a hairdresser.” “You’re sure your father isn’t Hungarian?” … The plump, cozy Victorian structure ofSleuth is redefined by Pinter’s elliptical, weapons-grade nastiness. [ Link]

… the verbal sparring is so sharp it’s a wonder nobody loses an eye… 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. [ Link]

Suspend disbelief!

Update: Here’s the trailer: