Lizzo Day 236

Not having seen the first (1972's) version of this, I so happened to generally enjoy last year's remake of Sleuth:

Back in 1972, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine starred in a film version of Anthony Shaffer's play Sleuth, as two men who face off over a woman in a witty, cerebral game of extended one-upmanship. Their marathon work netted them both Best Actor nominations. Thirty-five years later, a new version of Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh, remains an acting showdown. Caine is back, but now he's playing the older man to Jude Law's young upstart. Their battle is, again, over a woman, but almost nothing else remains the same. While the original film was written by Shaffer himself, this time the play has been very loosely adapted by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, and he's made the piece faster, meaner, and weirder. [as briefed here]

... then I ran into a few negative reviews but only bothered to actually read one of these: Richard Corliss's, in the view of whom comparison with the initial release seems to weigh heavily

In the original movie [...], Andrew was played by Laurence Olivier, widely considered the century's greatest actor; and Michael Caine, who came to movie fame as the charming cad Alfie, was Milo. In a promising symmetry, this Sleuth has Caine playing the older man and Jude Law, who starred in a 2004 sequel to Alfie, as his young rival. [...]
Yet Pinter, in adapting the play, betrayed a carelessness bordering on contempt. The original is a two-act story that takes more than two hours; the new one synopsizes all that plot into the first hour, then adds a third act that diminishes, demeans, defames both the material and the actors. [...] The reason that the first film version [...] worked is that Mankiewicz filmed what Shaffer wrote. It's a play about role-playing, an unapologetic display of actors doing their tricks, putting on masks, throwing their voices — all the delicious stunts that say the theater is a game. [...] What's clear from the opening shot of Branagh's version is that he desperately wants this Sleuth to be not the record of a play but a real, filmy film. Unfortunately, his notion of film is a combination of bizarre camera angles and an alternation of baffling long shots and punishing closeups. [...]

Inattentive to such details as outlined above [and many more, as can be read in the Times review], to me, 2007's version of Sleuth seemed witty though brief, a delightful break from one's usual weekend evenings' telly shows - and so much more so for the case of Portuguese television. Surely the unit that one uses to measure against plays an important part in one's appreciation (or dislike) of a particular artistic creation... but I still don't think this such an unfortunate theatrical display as outcried in the review above.
Any other takers?