Alfie (2004) - by Faro

Alfie is a man without a plan. He is aimless and haphazard, and his showy self-confidence is thus thin and unsupported… a paper playboy that falls at the slightest breath of troubled wind. If one is going to flout social convention and be something a bit more than a witless knave, then one must have a plan and a philosophy. This requires a bit of thought and consideration, and constant re-evaluation as the world shifts around you. A random and half-assed philosophy concocted around a Word of the Day Calendar is hardly sufficient. With such inattention to the larger structure of things Alfie ends up looking like a well-dressed fool who is unaware that it is fear of women, as well as lust for them, that truly motivates him. It is hard to spend two hours with someone who is so profoundly unaware of themselves.

But that is not the worst of this silly movie… the worst is that the structure of the screenplay is only moderately tweaked from the original Michael Caine vehicle from 1966. What was edgy and fresh then comes across as hackneyed and hollow now. We actually have advanced the national conversation concerning sex and race and gender a bit in the last 40 years, and a proper remake should have completely upended the original script to provide fresh insight. Instead, we watch this movie with the growing realization that we have slept with this person before, and there was a reason we lost their phone number.