To me, the experience of Sleuth is comparable to watching an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo: it's perfectly enjoyable for five minutes or so, but pretty soon you're ready for the rest of the band to come on stage to complete the show.

Such is the case with Sleuth. That the movie is based on a play (by Anthony Shaffer) and directed by a classically-trained actor (Kenneth Branagh) comes as no surprise. It's essentially a vehicle for stars Michael Caine and Jude Law to show off their considerable acting skills. Which is fine -- for a while. Eventually, however, the charming duel between the wily elder and his pretty young nemesis grows extraordinarily tiresome.

The story is relatively straightforward: A successful crime novelist (Caine) is confronted by the unemployed actor (Law) who ran away with his wife. Law's character wants Caine's to grant his wife a divorce; after some prodding, the embittered author eventually agrees to grant the divorce, but only if the young suitor complies with a bizarre set of conditions. Thus begins a deadly game of wits.

There is such a concept as having a too much respect for the source material, as Branagh does with Sleuth. Other then some unconventional (and often distracting) camerawork, little effort is made to make the work more cinematic and thus more accessible to a movie audience. The film's running time may be only 86 minutes, but to me it felt at least twice as long.

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