Jude Law deserves stardom. Only a genuine star can make an utterly unnecessary, impact-free remake marginally worth watching, even for aficionados of the original '60s socio-shocker.
With seamless charm to supplement his disturbingly flawless looks, Law assumes the role of the selfish, womanizing hedonist played by Michael Caine in 1966. But that film crossed a line as a brute-force wake-up call for a world still observing sexual propriety but about to plunge into cultural chaos. Caine's swinging, swaggering Londoner, while seductive and insinuating, was far more cold and callous—even amoral—in his treatment of women, from casually cruel quips to turning lives upside down without fear of consequence, forcing one despondent conquest into an abortion, even ordering women to wash his clothes and clean his flat.
Relocated to Manhattan, Law's limo-driving bloke is merely a metrosexual bad boy, no more scandalous than one of the self-absorbed cads on Sex and the City, which spawned a female Alfie in man-gobbling Samantha. In our obsessively sexualized culture, Alfie is now just another Details dude. He even dabs cologne above "Big Ben."
Law's perpetual flirt flits from affair to affair with the twinkle of sex in his eyes, which are always set on FBB: "face, boobs, bum." (Even Islamic women wink at him over their face-coverings.)
Next to screwing, Alfie's best at babbling, incessantly addressing us, even while on his back during a limo-lay with married Jane Krakowski. His take on life: "It doesn't do to become dependent on anyone," and, "She doesn't have enough of the superficial things that really matter."
A string of extended encounters follow, from the grounded single mom (Marisa Tomei) who cuts him loose to the troubled free spirit (Sienna Miller) he can't commit to, and the girlfriend (Nia Long) of his best friend (Omar Epps) who he knocks up on a pool table, to the older woman (a ripe Susan Sarandon) who pulls him up short by embodying his own behavior.
Alfie suffers a penile health scare and must confront the consequences of his catting around, but it all unfolds as merely the episodic, and not especially meaningful, journeys of a cad. But Law's a big-screen magnet who can make even the inconsequential adventures of a walking one-eyed worm watchable.