Less bleak than original

Rating: Null/10 (19 September 2002)

*** MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***

This is a reasonably atmospheric film, but it suffers the common fault of Hollywood remakes: remoulding an original into a more conventional form, with the inevitable urge to fill in 'back story' and add lengthy expositions to explain character motivation.
The strength of the original Insomnia was its unrelenting bleakness and moral greyness: Stellan Skaarsgard's detective attempted to molest a teenage witness and a female colleague, shot a live dog, and thought a litter of cute kittens "disgusting"; and ultimately got away with covering up his mistake with the help of the female detective.
In contrast, I was never in any doubt about the moral angst of the standard weary and cynical Al Pacino cop, and his death, while encouraging Hilary Swank's character to do the decent thing, was a standard deathbed redemption. The 2002 ending was an extremely cliched shootout and rescue, again losing the irony of the original, where the villain's accidental death proves a fitting end to a man whose arrogance is in thinking he has every eventuality covered.
Enjoyable, but by no means as complex as some reviewers claim: 6/10