DARK & DARKER : 'Dancer in the Dark' & 'Get Carter'. - Review - movie review

Commonweal, Nov 3, 2000 by Rand Richards Cooper

Where Dancer in the Dark puts the musical to a wild array of ironic uses, Stephen Kay's Get Carter gives us another sturdy genre, film noir, and asks no more than that we sit back and bask in its tough-guy sorrows and shadows. The opening credits cite a novel by Ted Lewis, Jack's Return Home, but the ghost presence here is British director Mike Hodges's 1971 cult classic, Get Carter, which starred Michael Caine as Jack Carter (Sylvester Stallone has the role this time 'round), a gang enforcer come home to solve his brother's mysterious death and rack up a few badly needed redemption points for himself in the process.

Caine has a supporting role in the new film, and to see him as the recipient of hard-bitten lines he uttered three decades ago ("You're a big man, but you're out of shape and with me it's a full-time job, so sit down") makes for a nice nod of homage. Indeed, Get Carter faithfully serves up the elements of film noir. Rain-drenched streets at night; a hopelessly knotty plot; furious car chases; various scumbags crawling out from under various rocks (including Mickey Rourke as a smirking pornographer); cigarettes everywhere, and sunglasses, and mirrors--harsh reflections and oblique camera angles that suggest trouble lurking around every corner. The film is lighted in a metallic blue murk so dark, you feel like tearing off all those sunglasses in sheer frustration.

And yet despite hitting every touchstone, Get Carter misses the noir sensibility, and does so spectacularly. There's a cynical, mean-streets-hero intelligence--the Humphrey Bogart quality, if you will--that's absent, and without it the film veers between brutal and maudlin. Stallone lumbers through scene after scene, his massive frame shrink-wrapped in sky-blue suits with gleaming silk ties, his face decorated with scars and a Frankie Valli-style goatee. It isn't just a looks problem, either. "Did you ever wanna take every mirror in the world and get rid of it," he intones at one point, "'cause you didn't like what was coming back at you?" Caine's Carter would utter such words in an unguarded moment, then quickly hustle away from them, but Stallone plays his role with hangdog sorrow, as if pleading for a bone of sympathy. Kay and his screenwriter, David McKenna, violate noir's rule of allowing you only a peek, a dodging inference, at its hero's suffering soul. Maybe we're too needy for that by now, too hooked on pathos. This is noir for the age of Oprah.

Screen violence has changed since 1971 as well, and the current Get Carter is far more vicious, in a pumped-up, steroidal way, than the original. That too is a problem. Caine's menace emanated not from a WWF-sized body, but from inner layers of calculation and detachment, and a studied capacity for cruelty. His Carter hinted at literary origins (at the start he sat on a train reading Raymond Chandler)--the antihero as closet philosopher, whose fists and gun aren't just wreaking havoc with other people's bodies, but scoring points in an existential argument. Stallone's Carter, on the other hand, comes off as a mere thug. "You sit here and shut your mouth," he snarls, "or this is going to the next level."