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Sleuth is the story of a rich man who invites his wife’s lover over to his home in order to match wits with him and humil­i­ate him or worse. It stars Michael Caine as the rich old guy and Jude Law as the younger man who is liv­ing with his wife. What fol­lows is a sur­pris­ingly cap­ti­vat­ing tale of two intel­lec­tual men going at it, each one try­ing to show that his mem­ber is big­ger than the other. There is some vio­lence but most of it is a test of will and wits. There’s not a lot of action here. The entire story takes place at one large and rather strange home. There are very few actors and a con­sid­er­able amount of dia­log. This is a remake that was sup­posed to have added some­thing to its predecessor.

I have to say this movie started out a bit bor­ing and I was expect­ing it to be the same through­out and in a way it was but I some­how got caught up in the dia­log, try­ing to see which of the two would end up on top. The fact is you don’t find out for sure until the end of the movie. Because of the lack of action and the rather sta­tic back­ground, (made more so because of the tiny cast), this movie isn’t for every­one. There’s no adven­ture, no romance, no sex, a small amount of mys­tery besides who will win the exchange and while there are tense moments in the film, I’d say it’s just barely a thriller. Again, there was a lot of dia­log and some­times it seemed to get a bit mixed together and con­fus­ing. That said, the film was good enough to see once and not a total waste of my time. I give this a 3 out of 4 marks. [star­review tpl=16]