WHY ON EARTH should we feel sorry for Alfie? He swans around New York bonking beautiful women and then expects us to weep for him after the proverbial kick in the teeth. Michael Caine famously brought this character to life in Lewis Gilbert’s Sixties classic, and David Bailey was so impressed he turned the actor into an iconic pin-up: sharp suit, boxy glasses and a cigarette carelessly dangling from a pair of kissable lips. This was the era when notches on your headboard were status symbols in their own right. When party invitations were determined not on money or breeding, but on the quality of your drugs or your skill in the sack.

Alfie was a snapshot film, and Caine was brilliant casting. He was a classless Lothario with genuine snap, crackle and pop. A misogynist? For sure. The game was always more interesting than the catch, and frankly no one took much notice of the soul-destroying moral that seduction is utterly meaningless when it becomes the only point. I’d be amazed if anyone bothers taking that lesson home from Charles Shyer’s expensive remake. To be honest the film is not that bad, and the story has a natural grip because Alfie is one of those monsters who can style a teenager’s most impressionable years.

Jude Law plays the limousine taxi driver like a sex-mad Alan Whicker, whisking us around the hot spots of Manhattan with a sardonic eye on the best places to pick up chicks. It’s an odd mix of microphone formality and self-preening lust. An insider’s guide to desperate women: how they work, what their foibles are, and when to bail out.

Charles Shyer’s clever move is to transplant Alfi’s story to Manhattan where girls are weaned on Sex and the City; where a charming Englishman can impress with his accent; and where being used and dumped has the novelty value of Green Shield stamps.

It’s Alfie’s desire to spill the beans that hooks us. As feeble wannabes we’re greedy for his golden secrets. How exactly does he juggle all his totty? There’s a single mum, Marisa Tomei (too clingy); a kinky clubber, Sienna Miller (too loose); and a rich elderly vamp played by Susan Sarandon (too clever by half). The sex looks sublime. But Alfie’s homilies are as dated as well Alfie. The split screen narrative, and the little macho tips told straight to camera, are as topical as Marigold rubber gloves. This wisdom won’t wash with spotty youths.

Jude Law is one of the most attractive human beings on the planet. He’s also a good actor. But he doesn’t click as a metropolitan smoothie. For better or worse, Law doesn’t have that reservoir of cynicism that Caine effortlessly tapped. The cool frisson that comes with being preternaturally good-looking and recklessly indiscriminate evaporates by the second shag. Law (being Law) is too much with the moral rather than the moment. He is too sensitive to the consequences. Alfie’s best moments are about terminal denial.

The seductions are Benny Hill. Example. Alfie is lying in the back of the limo with his hands tucked behind his head, smirking knowingly at the camera, while a bored rich client relives her greatest Epsom gallops astride his midriff.

“It’s my favourite position,” he explains. For unaroused viewers, this is pure nostalgia. For those of us who now know, it’s a parking ticket. You can see why Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart felt compelled to write a handful of original songs for the soundtrack.

This was certainly Mick’s modus operandi in his heyday. There’s a yearning in the lyrics that must sound like a broken record to the procession of leggy lovelies he once squired.

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