Re-do The Hustle

Rating: 4/10 (11 December 2019)

I deliberately watched this after "The Hustler" and it probably didn't help my appreciation of "The Color Of Money". In fact I'd say that if the principals here were movie directors that only the been-there-and-lived-it Eddie Felson could have directed "The Hustler", while it would take someone like a brash, flashy Vincent Lauria to come up with "The Color Of Money".
There's lots of technique in Scorsese's feature with countless showy examples of imaginative editing and camera set-ups but the film is weak on story and characterisation and no amount of stylised high-end cinematography can mask or change that. The film really is a more of a homage to Newman who finally won his lead actor Oscar on his sixth nomination for his work here but the great man isn't much more than a show-horse.
Cruise is okay as the young hustler Newman takes under his wing, all nervous energy and callowness but of course watching him work you're reminded of Newman's own performance when he was the new kid on the block twenty five years before and there's little comparison. Scorcese tries to work the women into the narrative but both Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Helen Shaver only come off as peripheral. Elsewhere, you'll see Iggy Pop in a pointless cameo which could only have been inserted for some wannabe street-cred.
The soundtrack produced by Robbie Robertson, late of The Band, for whom Scorsese of course made "The Last Waltz" ten years before, likewise comes over as incongruous and mannered with a blues-heavy selection of tunes and background music which again only heightens the artificiality of the overall film.
There's no real emotional core or climax to the film and certainly not the tension that Robert Rossen created in black and white, in fact it seems to me that the narrative got lost somewhere in between some deliberately Oscar-baiting acting and show-off direction. I wanted to like this movie but it came across ultimately as empty and pointless.
This was the second of Scorcese's two big-budget, high-profile remakes of classic black and white Hollywood features of the early 60's, the other being "Cape Fear" but here again he comes off second best compared to the originals.
A bit of a miscue all round for this one unfortunately.