Enough is done right to make you wish they’d made better decisions and everything looks good in this colour noir… but the central relationship lacks conviction.
Greene fans will raise a sceptical eyebrow, but it's an adaptation brimming with enough ideas to justify this second stick of Rock
Riley is no match for Richard Attenborough in the 1947 version.
The film has style, verve, craft and not least a knowledge of when to lie low and let Greene's story speak for itself.
On the one hand, the new film more explicitly engages with elements of the novel sidelined in the first film – the religious theme, its grubby sexual and violent content – and on the other, it finds a perfect context for the story of the rise and fall of a teenage gangster in the youth revolt of the early-60s embodied by the mods’n’rockers riots in Brighton.
There are some decent set pieces, but the whole affair tends towards the over styled, and all the lightness and brightness strips the drama of its tension.
Visually striking, dramatically uninvolving.
A bold and exhilarating picture, summoning up, in its own way, a chill seafront breeze of guilt and shame.
An eye-catchingly impressive array of British thespian talent. Trouble is, they’re all acting in different movies, most of them not very good ones.
Joffe's film nods to the novel's twisted Catholicism but never conveys that insidious mood of evil, and the plot's action, particularly in its last third, feels terribly creaky.
While the action is neatly moved from the 1940s to 1964, and the film has a fitting noir look, comparisons to the original are inevitable and sobering.
A melodramatic misfire.
It's somewhat unfortunate, then (not to mention a little ironic given the story's central motif), that Brighton Rock lacks a consistent through line. As it nears the finale, it reverts to a full-blown meditation on Catholicism, original sin and the nature of evil and buckles under the weight of religious imagery that starts to feel extraneous rather than integral to the new world in which the story finds itself.
The result is a bold, stylish failure.
If you're looking for depth or nuance...you won't find it on this end-of-the-pier ghost train.
Although excellent, it suffocates the pivotal central relationship, which by the end feels under-developed.
Sam Riley shot to fame as the doomed Ian Curtis in Control. Now he's playing creepy Pinkie in Brighton Rock
Brighton Rock set report: Pier and loathing
Andrea Riseborough--Let's hear it for Miss Versatility
Brighton Rock: appalling strangeness
Brighton Rock: realm of the pier
No end to the affair: The torrid liaison between Graham Greene's fiction and the cinema
Sam Riley: From Joy Division to Brighton Rock
Brighton Rock reconnects with the novel's central theme of Catholic guilt
Brighton Rock remake actress Andrea Riseborough--profile
General release. Check local listings for show times.