Director: Kenneth Branagh, 15, 86min Stars: Michael Caine, Jude Law, Harold Pinter

On general release

Caine, Law, Branagh and Pinter. It may sound like a firm of solicitors, but this conceptual cross-pairing is the only selling point in what turns out to be an uncomfortably smug vanity production. Thirty-five years after he played Milo Tindle in Anthony Shaffer’s tricksy two-hander, Caine takes the senior role, the cuckolded husband and best-selling mystery writer Andrew Wyke.

When Tindle (Law, above with Caine) shows up on his doorstep to petition for a divorce, Wyke unveils an elaborate counter-offer. He’ll walk the actor through an artfully staged break-in so that he can make off with the family jewels. Wyke, meanwhile, recoups a pretty penny on the insurance. No sucker but too cocky for his own good, Tindle is coaxed into agreeing.

It is not often that production design is allowed to upstage actors this good, but the modernist contraption that Wyke calls home comes very close, with its sliding walls, glass lift and ubiquitous security cameras. Does it matter that we cannot imagine Wyke living here? Perhaps not. This is a theatrical piece, a role-playing game based on the characters’ unreliable identities and transformative skills. Branagh invites us to admire the display: two male birds circling each other, fanning their plumage. That is not so hard to do, but don’t ask us to believe a word either man says, or to care what becomes of them.

Pinter’s most drastic revision excavates the original’s well-buried homosexual tension, but this abrupt about-face is no more credible than the rest of the film. The new Sleuth isn’t playful or surprising, just nasty and meretricious. It is nearly an hour shorter than the old film, but all the fun of the original has gone.

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