PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/05/04)


If Lewis Gilbert’s 1966 Alfie (scripted by Bill Naughton from his own play) was a charmingly iconic, darkly ironic evaluation of the perils of the Sexual Revolution, then Charles Shyer’s remake du jour is a charmingly chic, dramatically weak ode to the post-Metrosexual Revolution.  Starring ubiquitous pretty-boy Jude Law in the titular role that helped launch Michael Caine’s career, the once-shocking Alfie has become an endearingly footloose, if somewhat innocuous comedy about the chain of events leading up to a swaggering womanizer’s existential crisis.  Caine’s cockney accent is gone and Law’s reincarnation is now a London-imported New Yorker, but Alfie still monologues much of his honest, heartfelt superficiality directly into the camera.

Somewhere in a Mick Jagger-scored Movie Manhattan—where all the women glimmer and the billboards are filled with one-word cosmic answers like Pursue, Desire and Wish—fashion whore and limo driver-by-day Alfie Elkins is about to get schooled in his ongoing sex with the city.  While he’s witty, boyishly handsome, and practically living the life of a cultured gigolo, the poor promiscuous sap is so hopelessly detached that he knows when he’s lying to himself, but can’t think to ask, "what’s it all about?"  The single mom (Marisa Tomei) reads through his wishy-washiness and shoos him away, his friend and business partner (Omar Epps) has written him off after knocking up his flame (Nia Long), one chick is just nuts (Sienna Miller, Law’s real-life girlfriend), and his older, female doppleganger (Susan Sarandon) has mercilessly dumped him for someone younger.  Even nonplussed, Alfie is still an incorrigible sex fiend (self-absorbed romantic?) whose stylishly split-screened, Vespa-riding, blind buoyancy decrees that he may never learn from his mistakes… and that’s life, baby.

Owing to these types of metropolitan hedonists existing today, Alfie has the capacity to contemporize a meaty exploration of the modern-day Lothario.  Law owns every scene he’s in—which is literally all of them—plus a decent supporting cast and dapper dialogue truly make for a breezy good time, but the new-and-unproved Alfie is only as deep as its hero, and probably in as much need for a good therapist.

—Aaron Hillis