Jay Rohr
In 1971, Get Carter, like Dirty Harry, Klute, and others, helped refashion the notion of film noir. Chiaroscuro lighting derived from Expressionist films gave way to muddy colors. Gritty realism pushed heightened reality into the backseat. Yet, the vibe of someone’s dark descent remained potent. Get Carter was a cult classic Hollywood couldn’t help remaking because that mistake is part of its audience-approved DNA. As good as the original was, its 2000 remake, a lifeless Sylvester Stallone vehicle, suffers by comparison.
The original stars Michael Caine (The Italian Job) as Jack Carter, a ruthless London gangster visiting his hometown Newcastle. Unfortunately, this isn’t a holiday visit. Jack returns to attend the funeral of his brother, Frank. While there he quickly confirms suspicions about the car accident that killed his sibling. It isn’t long before Jack sets about brutalizing the local gangsters for information. Gathering clues through a mix of intimidation, seduction, and outright murder he learns the dark truth behind his brother’s death.
It’s a classic revenge tale based on a Ted Lewis novel entitled Jack’s Return Home. Perhaps loosely inspired by real events, the book “created a new genre British Noir… and replaced the anaemic Miss Marple with the harsh reality of professional criminals, and the brutality of their lives, from which every succeeding British crime writer has taken their cue.” The plots are obviously quite similar, primarily involving Carter bullying his way through the local underworld. What matters more, though, is the view both works provide. In another sign the optimistic swinging Sixties were done, shifting into the grim cynicism of the 70s, harsh truth and gritty realism took the wheel.
Michael Caine masterfully inhabits the role of a sadistic gangster, who can charm anyone. His eyes and smile have this bizarre quality wherein he effortlessly shifts between intimidating or friendly depending on the moment. It’s like watching a bully wrap their arm around their black-eyed victim then kindly ask them to say there’s nothing wrong. Furthermore, he knows how to apply pressure through his sinister reputation just by being in a room. Caine’s Carter is the definition of someone with a commanding, albeit unsettling presence, especially once people recognize him.
More than anything, he’s a violent psychopath. This is a top-tier antihero, whom no one should wish to emulate. Although frequently wrapped up in fashionable suits, Jack Carter is a monster, regardless of his relatable motivations. His coldness comes across marvelously in various scenes. For instance, when an innocent bartender gets beaten severely for assisting him, Carter’s response is to throw a few bills at the battered body while telling the fellow to get some karate lessons. Bizarrely enough, this cold viper is somehow irresistible to the ladies, who jump into bed with him at a wink. It’s amazing he has the strength to punch anyone considering how much sex Carter has.
Director Mike Hodges wonderfully adds to the atmosphere. He wisely shifted the story’s location from Doncaster in the novel to Newcastle for the film. The industrial city heightened the gritty appearance of the movie. Hodges then employed his documentarian background to capture “a true feel for [Newcastle’s] smoky pubs, parades, racetrack, dance hall, and industrial black shoreline littered with piles of coal slag, bridges, dark alleys, drab back-to-back terraces, and demolition sites.” It certainly didn’t hurt that, at the time, Newcastle was at the heart of a scandal that severely wounded the British government. That lent a strange plausibility to the film, implying a corruption no scene could conceive alone.
Meanwhile, Get Carter is filled with weary faces of people worn down by life — the cynically detached embracing the emptiness of existence by resigning themselves to the grave or being as immoral as it takes to grasp fleeting riches. Every view of the city suggests somewhere grim, and all the miserable inhabitants are obviously scarred, scared, or disreputable. This visual dynamic alongside Caine’s cool casual coldness would go on to inspire several filmmakers.
Get Carter apparently helped spark Quentin Tarantino, and “quickly became one of Stanley Kubrick’s all-time favorites.” Every Guy Richie gangster movie includes some variation on a Jack Carter type. Consider, Charlie Hunnam (Pacific Rim) in The Gentleman (2019), a well-dressed criminal who tries to talk his way through most situations but is more than willing to get violent. Then there’s The Long Good Friday (1980) and Dead Man’s Shoes (2004).
Upon release, Get Carter didn’t do well. However, there is no denying it’s current cult status. Critic Pauline Kael wrote, “There’s nobody to root for but the smartly dressed sexual athlete and professional killer in this English gangland picture, which is so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness.” It feels strange to say that what Kael despised about the movie may be exactly what makes it appealing to a certain subset of people.
U.S. marketing through United Artists didn’t help the film any. It’s been observed that “Get Carter had everything in place in order to avoid a general USA release: heroin, brutality, complete unintelligibility for a general American audience despite a redub… limited release at the bottom of a double bill with Frank Sinatra’s Dirty Dingus Magee.” Fortunately, in the years since, the bad redub has been overall replaced by the proper audio. Still, at the time, the film’s release primarily aimed at the drive-in circuit where it failed to rake in the dollars.
Yet, a loyal following of fans plus renewed attention in the 1990s, thanks to a restoration of the movie’s original negatives as well as audio — the critical impression of Get Carter has shifted over the years. Perhaps, it’s no surprise then that Hollywood came sniffing around. The scent of a potentially profitable remake comes off any such intellectual property. Producers view fans as guaranteed sales, not discriminating viewers. Plus, they assume the film is already made; cut & paste with a few minor adjustments then cash in hand. And it’s that mentality which brings us to Get Carter made in 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone.
Since the stories are largely the same, a synopsis isn’t necessary. Both versions of Get Carter stick to the same concept. Stallone’s variant takes place in Seattle, and the erotic aspect is toned down a tad. The ending to the remake is also far less ambiguous, bordering on a happy ending.
It was not well received. Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times that the movie is, “so minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world’s first movie without even a text.” It really is just plot point to plot point with none of the atmospheric visuals or captivating characterizing dialogue, erotic or tense, that make up the 1971 version.
Stallone isn’t terrible in the film. Honestly, I think he’s a better actor than people give him credit for. The problem here is that he can be charming or dangerous but never at the same time. The thing about Michael Caine’s performance is that he radiates menace through a mix of the two. There’s a coldness even to his most charming moments that conveys an utter lack of empathy as if all his emotions are a façade. Stallone portrayals individual with a switch in his head. Crossing him makes it go click, flipping him from friendly fellow to hulking brute.
One could argue these are simply acting choices, but such decisions affect the whole picture. The problem is that the 2000 remake tries too hard to be the 1971 version instead of being its own film. That means the movie is never playing to the lead performer’s strengths. Michael Caine can be subtle and loquacious in a way Stallone simply cannot. The result is a box office catastrophe.
Remakes are nothing new. Back in 1895, the Lumière brothers made a short film called Partie d’écarté (Card Game). It’s essentially three people playing cards and drinking wine. Around about 1896, director Georges Méliès remade it as Une partie de cartes (1896), a.k.a. A Game of Cards or Card Party. The Great Train Robbery (1903) was famously remade shot-for-shot. And there is a considerable list of flicks that have been routinely remade over the decades. A Star is Born (2018) is the fourth remake of a 1937 romantic drama, itself technically a remake inspired by the plot of What Price Hollywood? (1932).
In 1937, Ezra Goodman wrote, “The literary truism that a tale twice told is not necessarily a tale grown old has been adopted lock, stock and barrel by the diligent denizens of the West coast… Hollywood is currently planning, producing and releasing a number of remakes of old, successful films that have withstood the ravages of time and the fluctuations of public taste.”
Now consider that Alfred Hitchcock made a successful film in 1936 called The Man Who Knew Too Much starring Peter Lorre. Then in 1956, he remade the movie with Jimmy Stewart in the lead. Hitchcock later remarked to François Truffaut, “The first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”
These two quotes sum up the essence of remakes. There is a desire to cash in on what’s already been successful as well as a chance to make something better. That was the intention with 1980s horror movies. Improvements in special effects permitted profoundly intense new visions of The Thing, The Fly, and The Blob.
In addition, remakes have the potential to use familiar stories to showcase contemporary issues. Scarface (1983) took “Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster tragedy and detonates them into… a fever dream of Reagan-era aspiration. What had been a cautionary tale about Prohibition-era racketeering becomes… an opera of cocaine and capital, drenched in the lurid hues of Miami Vice modernity.” Oddly enough, Get Carter got the same treatment.
Long before Stallone mumbled his way into the role, Bernie Casey (Cleopatra Jones) stepped into a uniquely inspired adaptation of Jack’s Return Home. Instead of the titular Jack Carter, he played Tyrone Tackett in a blaxploitation rendition of the narrative. Hit Man was released in 1972, and the Catholic Film Office declared its “dizzying spectacle of raw sex and supergraphic violence would horrify the Marquis de Sade.” The point being, Gene Corman, who produced the picture, made it his own movie.
Remake is often a pejorative term, one implying a lack of imagination, not to mention shameless cash grabs. And there is some truth to that. However, the idea they have to be failures ignores the long list of remakes that have remained popular over the years. True Lies (1994) is a remake of the 1991 French comedy La Totale!, continuing James Cameron’s gift for borrowing the best elements from other sources. Every time Hollywood gets a fresh crop of female performers one of three Jane Austen novels suddenly needs a new adaptation — Emma, Sense and Sensibility, or Pride and Prejudice.
Audiences don’t hate remakes. They hate bad ones. And the thing is, that as times change reenvisioning a film may actually be necessary. Imagine Gone with the Wind except unlike the original, a remake doesn’t lean into the Lost Cause myth romanticizing the racist Confederacy it dismantles it. Similarly speaking, a new take could go in a completely different direction. Case in point, Little Shop of Horrors (1986) turned a shlock 50s Corman cult classic into a mirthfully macabre musical with dramatically improved effects.
Remakes allow filmmakers to recontextualize, refine flawed films, and connect them to modern audiences, who may then look to the past and enjoy the earlier version as well. Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025) is a fine film, but it doesn’t erase Kurosawa’s High and Low. In fact, it puts the two in conversation with one another, especially given their differences. The same way The Magnificent Seven (1960) communicates with its inspiration Seven Samurai (1954).
The flaw in Stallone’s Get Carter was trying to recapture the essence of a film instead of making his own picture. Such remakes are doomed from the start. They can only be a hollow echo chasing a classic.
