Faking it | 22 November 2012

The star of Gambit, it seems, is the Savoy. And why not? Nobody else seems to want to lay claim to this movie, a refashioning of the 1966 art con caper that starred Michael Caine. Not even Colin Firth, who spends a fair amount of time in the new film unhappily legging it, trouserless, up and down the hotel’s refurbished corridors.

If you want to make an artistic copy, it had better be really good or you might as well not try, is the inadvertent message of this film. Scriptwriters the Coen brothers have taken the basic elements of the vintage Caine vehicle, which also had Shirley Maclaine, and made a crude sketch whose plot is paper-thin and whose characters are pencilled in. It’s a shame because, besides Firth, Gambit also boasts Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman, Tom Courtenay and Stanley Tucci — and all their star power is wasted on the hammy lines and half-hearted plot.