GET CARTER (2000) - **

In the current issue of MEN'S JOURNAL, current feel-good Hollywood comeback story Mickey Rourke recounts of how at the ebb of his career, he got a thug part in GET CARTER primarily because star Sylvester Stallone believed Rourke could convincingly beat him up. Plus, it was a favor. When the studio offered Rourke only scale wages that insulted him, he balked. His paycheck then doubled, but later on the set he learned that Sly himself put up the extra money to get Rourke. With Rourke possibly going to win the Oscar for THE WRESTLER, he's just signed on to Stallone's all-star action picture THE EXPENDABLES, so I guess he's paying back his debts.

Anyway, Stallone was right for one nice scene, you do buy that Rocky gets his ass handed to him by Rourke. I really liked how they confront each other at a mansion party, both walk off together to an unoccupied room, and proceed to brawl. Earlier, when Rourke smugly asks Sly how pretty he is, Rambo replies: "Yeah, like cat-piss in the snow." Damn, a pity that the rest of the movie aint that good, nowhere near it.

Based off the 1971 British crime classic which I haven't seen, the GET CARTER remake has an ambition in theory that I should dig. That is, parlay itself like a 1970s crime picture would do when hampered by the R-rating standards of that epoch, where you could get a titty and some violence, but no where as excessive or graphic as say SIN CITY can be these days. But many of those simple no-bullshit slick flicks still kickass not from content, but from great acting and great scripting for which those thespians could become utter badass with. Apparently the original GET CARTER with Michael Caine is supposedly such a film.

A fine example for this update is when Sly confronts a rapist drug-dealer at an apartment balcony, who unsurprisingly pleads Stallone not to kill him. "You killed yourself." We cut to Sly leaving the building, and he walks by a car, where the sex offender fell onto.

Yet in spite of good intentions and a nice touch or two, I surprisingly found myself never really giving a serious shit about what was happening in GET CARTER. I mean Stallone, a native of Hell's Kitchen in New York City, is credible as a mob enforcer from the white ghetto. I can't blame Sly for this failure unlike his other turkeys. He certainly seems to be game to play a ruthless bastard thug who in a single-minded quest to find out who murdered his brother. Thus he goes back home to bury his sibling...and his killer.

But something about this movie just doesn't work, nor I ever cared about what was happening. In other words, this is the sort of action set-up and picture I usually eat up for breakfast, and I yet here I am unsatisfied. What is the fatal flaw? I enjoyed Steven Seagal's URBAN JUSTICE, which had a similar premise and similar resolve with a micro-budget compared to CARTER, so what is the difference?

I think what comes to mind immediately is that Sly's character itself in CARTER never early on gets a good opportunity to display undisputed badassry, to make flow the sort of movie that I described above. Sure Stallone beats up people in Las Vegas, but so what? In JUSTICE, Seagal meets his ex-wife at their son's funeral. You expect her to bitch at Seagal for finally coming back or whatever, but instead she only makes him promise to kill whoever was responsible, that's it. Compare that to CARTER, which like most other action pictures with such a premise, the relatives of the dead whine or complain at the avenging protagonist.

See my point? JUSTICE and the CARTER demarcate for one was unique regarding the hero's state of mind, and the other wasn't. Rhona Mitra plays a throwaway mistress/junkie in CARTER. I'm sure she from DOOMSDAY could easily beat up Stallone, not because he's weak in contrast to her DOOMSDAY persona with that robotic-surveillance camera for an eyeball.

Take the sequence when Sly meets millionaire/criminal Alan Cumming at his office. I like that Cumming claims his pornography racket partner Rourke (and threatening blackmailer) killed Sly's brother, but Stallone was keen enough to see through this bullshit, that Cumming only wanted him to conveniently eliminate a problem. Just imagine though, at their skyscraper office, with a giant window overlooking the whole city, Sly could simply say to Cumming: "This looks like a tall building. How long you think it would take a body to hit the sidewalk?" Remember HEAT when DeNiro is sincere about his capabilities with that lucid warning over the phone? Such a simlpe moment which carries heavy weight is what GET CARTER so desperately craves, but never finds.

Then again, I doubt director Stephen T. Kay has that much imagination within him. His career consists basically of this, several episodes of THE SHIELD, and that lousy horror movie BOOGEYMAN. He also co-wrote THE MOD SQUAD, which absolutely sucked. I mean for the most part in CARTER, his filmatic goals are solid but then he pulls an idiotic editing regime at a rave, such so-confusing-I'm-bored nonsense that Tony Scott and Michael Bay are real big fans of.

A website years back voted this as the worst remake ever, and I totally disagree. It's worthless and probably pointless, but I wonder if those ballot casters would change their vote if they saw last year's THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD REMAKE, or any of Michael Bay's horror rapes.

Hopefully, the real GET CARTER kicks as much as people over in the UK claim. As a nod, the CARTER remake casted the original Jack Carter in Michael Caine as a gangster/businessman. I enjoyed him, but wow his final sequence is just so awkward out-of-place with rest of this CARTER, nevermind his big reveleation making absolutely no fucking sense at all. Then I find out that Caine was brought back for more scenes after test audiences liked him.

I guess they were big fans of the genuine GET CARTER, and wished they were seeing that version instead.