"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Get Carter (2000)

Nearly 30 years after GET CARTER and its American cousin HIT MAN there was another version of the movie and/or its source novel, Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis. It starred Sylvester Stallone and was almost universally hated. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t fare well if hung up on a wall next to the 1971 version, but I find it at least interesting as an exercise in adaptation and an oddity in the Stallone filmography. And maybe I’m a little easier on it because it takes place in Seattle, with some of it actually filmed here.

In the mid ’90s, the ground was shifting under everyone’s feet. Hair metal bands felt displaced by Nirvana, MC Hammer decided he had to sign to Death Row Records, and the action heroes of the ‘80s were starting to see the writing on the wall. So by the end of the decade the once dominant Stallone was trying to find his place in a new world. JUDGE DREDD (1995) had been a notorious flop, and ASSASSINS (1995) and DAYLIGHT (1996) were poorly received. He couldn’t get Tarantino to cast him as Max Cherry in JACKIE BROWN. Though COP LAND (1997) had been one of Stallone’s best performances, it didn’t seem to bring him the critical credibility he was looking for, and his followup, the thriller D-TOX, was sitting on a shelf (it would be barely released in 2002 under the title EYE SEE YOU). Stallone been pigeonholed by his massive success as a larger than life action god, and many critics were more interested in rooting for his failure than seeing him evolve, or even return to his roots.

With that in mind I understand why it might’ve seemed like a good idea to do a new version of GET CARTER. Following the template of a movie that inspired the indies that had in some sense replaced him allowed him to work within the expected tough guy tropes (revenge, guns, punching) while slowing down a little, diving into a character, being a little more serious – a kind of in-between role to dip his toe into crime movie trends without straying too far from his wheelhouse. And at least he wasn’t trying to do his take on THE MATRIX.

He recruited director Stephen Kay, who had done THE LAST TIME I COMMITTED SUICIDE, the indie with Thomas Jane playing Neal Cassady, also known as the movie Keanu Reeves did instead of SPEED 2. The script is by Dave McKenna, who had done AMERICAN HISTORY X and BODY SHOTS. (Since then he’s done BLOW, BULLY, S.W.A.T., and the SCARFACE video game and created the TV show E-Ring.) And in a failed attempt to placate purists, they got Michael Caine himself (not long after winning a best supporting actor Oscar for CIDER HOUSE RULES) to play his late brother’s business partner.

This version of Jack Carter works as an enforcer in Vegas. The movie opens with him chasing Mark Boone Jr. down Fremont Street in Vegas (as seen in VEGAS VACATION).

Always have to note when I spot the Golden Nugget in a movie.

Carter comes to Seattle for his brother’s funeral – as in all versions, he’s suspicious about the story of a drunk driving accident, and starts asking around. Even though it’s pouring rain half the time, he refuses to change out of his trademark sharkskin suits ($5,000 silk ones according to the director commentary).

To fit the Seattle setting they made businessman Kinnear into a 30 year old software millionaire played by Alan Cumming (his followup to The Great Gazoo in THE FLINSTONES IN VIVA ROCK VEGAS). He seems to have fun wearing dumb cowboy hats, calling people “toadies” and blubbering in terror when threatened by Carter.

The Ian Hendry character Eric Paice is called Cyrus Paice, and is not a chauffeur but just an awesome party dude played by Mickey Rourke, always with women hanging off of him (including Rhona Mitra [BEOWULF] in the Dorothy White/Pam Grier role). He has pointy sideburns, wears fur coats and muscle shirts, confronts Carter in an alley, and has a bareknuckle fight with him at a mansion party. Rocky vs. Rourke.

Most of this movie I’m willing to take seriously, but I get a good laugh from the idea of Mickey Rourke in all his Mickey Rourke glory hanging out in the upstairs cybercafe part of a Seattle coffee shop (actually filmed in Vancouver BC) running a porn empire called “Hardcore Harry’s XXX Interactive” something or other and saying “You see all this shit? You see it? This is the new world, brotha. Im online. These are my girls. My business.”

Some of the stylistic devices have also aged goofily: white flashes, speed-ramping, Avid farts, dance music by Moby, Paul Oakenfold, Mint Royale and Groove Armada that I can’t really picture any character ever played by Stallone or Rourke wanting to listen to. These things meant to make the movie current for the turn of the millennium all seem obviously out of place – it was Stallone’s old school qualities that made him a fit for the story in the first place. But Kay has enough affection for the original to have Carter come to Seattle on a train and use a decent remix of Roy Budd’s classic theme, but how can you not laugh when it erupts into techno? It’s the first big movie for composer Tyler Bates (BALLISTIC), carrying over from THE LAST TIME I COMMITTED SUICIDE, several years before he became Zack Snyder’s guy and then Rob Zombie’s guy and then the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and JOHN WICK guy.

One other (I think) music related note: there’s a scene where a distorted voice seems to yell at Carter and associates right when a scuffle turns into a car chase. It seems diegetic – I thought it was a cop showing up and scolding them through a loudspeaker, but then it’s not? I determined it must’ve been a sample at the beginning of the song that starts playing, but on the director’s commentary Kay says, without explanation, that it’s his voice. I don’t get it. That part’s weird.

Unlike the previous versions of the character, this one doesn’t bed or romance anybody during his visit. He’s still got the thing going on where he has sexy phone talk with his secret girlfriend back home (an uncredited Gretchen Mol, who had been in Kay’s previous film), who he’s trying to steal from his boss (uncredited voice of Tom Sizemore). But he’s just staying at a normal hotel, there’s no subplot about screwing the bed & breakfast lady.

In fact, the biggest change in the story, and also the thing I find most worthy about the movie, is its emphasis on Carter trying to build relationships with his teenage niece Doreen (Rachael Leigh Cook, hot off of Dawson’s Creek and SHE’S ALL THAT, pre-JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS) and the new character of his brother’s widow Gloria (Miranda Richardson, Oscar nominee for DAMAGE and TOM & VIV and Golden Globe winner for FATHERLAND and ENCHANTED APRIL), who quite reasonably is bothered by his johnny-come-lately appearance in her life and blames him for the violence that follows.

I love Caine’s few scenes with his niece in the original, but this version makes her pretty much a co-lead. At the funeral she dismisses Carter saying, “You don’t know me. You’re a picture on the piano,” but later consents to going to a cafe with him. They become friends, and although I’m not sure how much time she’d really make for him, I kind of believe that she’d enjoy the novelty of hanging out with this dude and asking him uncomfortable questions about his criminality, not to mention upsetting her mother by getting to know him.

The best scene is still the one that made me not entirely dismiss the movie when I first saw it twentyish years ago. In this version, Carter discovers a CD with footage proving that an adult (Johnny Strong, who I know as the one main character to survive THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS but not return for any sequels) invited poor Doreen to hang out, and then drugged and raped her. And yes, Carter goes into the standard paternalistic vengeance mode. But before that there’s an entirely unexpected scene where he finds Doreen smoking on the roof of the hotel and tries to talk to her about it without coming right out and saying it. Telling her that she’s special, that “Things happen to us, Doreen, you know,” and “Your mother loves you, no matter what you think, she loves you, maybe you got things you have to talk to her about or some… problems, whatever.” It’s very ROCKY, and kinda monologue-at-the-end-of-FIRST-BLOOD, except he doesn’t let the tears out until he hands the baton to her and she does her monologue about what happened. You just don’t expect an action movie to treat that aspect so seriously, and I appreciate that.

The action is pretty small and straight forward, but has some moments. I like how there’s some random lady on an elevator sensing the tension before she gets off and he beats the shit out of John C. McGinley. And I enjoyed seeing cars tearing around recognizable Seattle streets. It made sense when I saw on the credits that the great Spiro Razatos (MANIAC COP) directed the 2nd unit in Seattle. According to the commentary they filmed right after the WTO demonstrations and for some reason that meant they weren’t allowed to fire off any guns. All the better to drive around real fast, though, right?

Shout out to the guy standing in the window of this building across the street from the Triangle Pub, next door to what is now Beastmode, who got to watch Stallone drive around a corner and get himself in the movie.

Just for the record, this takes place at Christmas time. You see some trees up, Christmas music is playing during the elevator fight, and one of the car chases runs through a tree lot. In case you’re looking for a new family tradition.

Yeah, you know what, I know it’s easy to be mad at unnecessary remakes, but I can’t hate this movie. First of all, it kicked off a few years of lower profile failures that made Stallone hungry enough to do ROCKY BALBOA. That’s a win for the universe. And Stallone is good in it and some of the dumb parts give me a laugh and some of the smart parts actually work. On the commentary track, director Kay doesn’t seem too pretentious or deluded, but does take his work seriously. Take a look at this shot of Carter in a taxi in the rain:


Kay says of that shot, “This stuff with the rain on the windshield and sort of shooting through things as we do throughout the movie is also about perception and about sort of the confusing image of ourselves, how we perceive ourselves.”

I’m not sure that came across to me then, bud. But I don’t want to make fun of it. In general it’s probly better for a director to overthink the ordinary than just not give a shit. His explanation of what he was going for with the movie is admirable, I think: “We set out to make sort of an odd action movie, and that’s what we got, with silence and darkness and alot of humanity, alot of introspection. Some of that is sitting on an editing room floor somewhere, the rest of it you just watched.”

#ReleasetheKayCut

Kay didn’t direct another movie until 2005 (the horror movie BOOGEYMAN starring Barry Watson and Emily Deschanel) and then, you guessed it, he became a TV guy and has done episodes of The Shield, Friday Night Lights, Sons of Anarchy, Taken, The Punisher and Yellowstone, plus true crime TV movies like THE HUNT FOR THE BTK KILLER, THE CRAIGSLIST KILLER and JUSTICE FOR NATALEE HOLLOWAY.

Since then there haven’t been any more official remakes of GET CARTER. Yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2020 at 10:16 am and is filed under Action, Crime, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

15 Responses to “Get Carter (2000)”

  1. “In general it’s probly better for a director to overthink the ordinary than just not give a shit.”

    Agreed. Irks me when snark-o-matics makes fun of writers and directors for taking their job at hand seriously for “low rent” stuff or anything.

    I always meant to see this one but never did since everything said about it was so negative and ya know… it’s a useless remake. This review makes me want to change that though.

  2. I am one of the few (I guess?) who really likes this one. I thought this was one of later-era Stallone’s best and definitely elevated by another oddball Rourke performance. Living in Seattle at the time this was released, I did get a kick out of seeing a few local landmarks like the Triangle, but I could also easily spot the Vancouver-shot parts as well. All the camera tricks and whooshes scream 2000, but it works for me, with the caveat of never seeing the original or Hit Man.

  3. I do miss Franchise Pictures from this era. The prestige, vanity and sleaze combo produced some truly interesting flicks.

    I remember not liking this one at the time, but I had just graduated from Film School and thought I was better than it. Still it was a pretty great car chase, and I am a sucker for that sort of techno score.

  4. I paid money at the cinema, didn’t hate it, was happy to see Mickey Rourke in anything at that point, mostly thought it was unnecessary. Everything is fine in the world…
    Then Stallone was doing his talkback Q and A for Rocky 6 over at aicn. Someone asked him if he regretted this, and he said that actually he was proud of it. You go Sly.

    BUT THEN, he goes on to say that people didn’t give it a chance just because it was remake, and actually, it’s technically a much better movie than the original, which was ‘shoddy’ at best.

    Uh, the fuck Sly?
    I challenged him on this point, but he seemed not willing to budge. He seems to think that the original Get Carter was a pretty terribly made movie, and that Michael Caine agrees or else he wouldn’t have done the remake (uh, that’s quite a stretch there buddy)

    So there you have it. Stallone was not paying homage to a classic, hoping it would make a little magic in his own career. But attempting to improve a movie he thought was pretty terrible. And if we weren’t so blinded by our allegiance to this terrible movie, we would have rightly appreciated this superior version.

    And some say Sly has a bit of an ego…

  5. jojo- what Stallone is saying about Caine there is especially amusing given that Caine is famously open about not caring all that much about the quality of the project he’s in, so long as the check clears at the end of the day.

    I haven’t seen this one in years and years and this review makes me want to revisit it. I didn’t like it at the time I think primarily because the change in the ending made the movie feel weaker and more traditionally “Hollywood” to me, but maybe I’d appreciate the differences more now.

    Also, Vern if you haven’t seen/reviewed DAYLIGHT, I actually think it’s worth a watch. I saw it while laying in bed recovering from the world’s most brutal sunburn in Mexico and I don’t know if it was the condition I was in or the quality of the movie, but I really enjoyed it. It’s much more of a natural disaster/adventure movie than an action piece, but I thought that was what was fun about it. Reminded me of CLIFFHANGER in that Sly is playing someone who is just very good at some unusual-but-physically-challenging job, rather than a fighter or soldier or cop or something.

  6. I remember enjoying this when I first saw it (probably on video, maybe at a second-run cinema — can’t remember). I didn’t get all the hate for it. This was a post-COPLAND joint that seemed to try to bridge the gap between that kind of film and more traditional sly fare. Going for more of that serious, moody vibe but obviously not trying for self-consciously “indie” thespian-ism. I never cared much for Rachel Leigh Cook, but I liked Sly, Caine, Mickey, and Alan Cumming in this one. No idea how it would hold up for me, though.

  7. Ah! This one just hurt my bloody eyes! Was pumped to see this from the trailers (Stallone as an enforcer in sharp suits, what’s not to like?) but this turned out to be his MAN ON FIRE. The potential for a cool revenge action flick effed up with an over-reliance on flash bang filmic gimmickry. I can take introspection in my action movies, not incoherence.

    The showdown between Stallone and Rourke was emblematic of what’s wrong with this movie. I recall a nightclub, it’s dark, lit only by strobe lighting, thumping techno music, a flailing of limbs…wait, who’s getting hit…what’s happening…oh there’s Rourke lying on the floor, bloodied..how did he get there…oooo Sly’s pressing a gun to his forehead, about to deliver the coup de grace…and …cut away to next scene! Exactly what I look for in my action films. I also watch porn to admire the decor.

  8. I like this one. Stallone’s good in it. And a revenge story can never really go wrong.

    Sylvester is an old friend of Caine since V FOR VICTORY and I bet it’s Sir Michael that’s been talking down the original. Although, in an interview I read he was talking about the famous line “You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape.” In the remake Stallone was supposed to sa “You’re in very bad shape”, and the original Carter didn’t like that at all! So he cares a bit…

  9. I believe one of Kay’s techniques was to turn the film camera off and on again mid-take.

    One of my first professional interviews was a roundtable with Sly for this. They didn’t screen the film but I didn’t need to. I had questions for Sly. Been meaning to watch again for old times sake.

    I do wonder why Copland didn’t lead to more indie movies. I always thought it was Sly didn’t want to take the pay cuts involved but maybe it was a lack of opportunity.

    I second Daylight. Really well constructed disaster movie.

  10. I love DAYLIGHT. I’m a sucker for old-school disaster/survival movies, where a bunch of people must try to get into safety (POSEIDON ADVENTURE, THE DEVIL AT 4’O CLOCK, etc) and DAYLIGHT is exactly that, with all the well used tropes of the genre. I guess that’s one of the reasons why it didn’t do well. It probably was too old fashioned for its own good, but it’s a really watchable and competent movie.

  11. Finally watched this just now. It’s VERY 2000, but very watchable nonetheless. Maybe it was the cast, maybe it was the wine (cheaper than beer, now that I’m unemployed). As to that weird bit of dialogue from the director, I figured that since the movie begins it starts with a bit of text (I don’t remember who it’s from) it was part of attempt to make this an ‘arty’ sort of action movie. Even tho those are the only two examples.
    I did have fun keeping track of Carter’s methods of conveyances. First, he has a rental car. Then, he hails a taxi. Next, he takes Doreens’s sweet vintage Mustang, and then he’s back to the rental. Both of the car chases were pretty top-notch tho. Not TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA or FRENCH CONNECTION mode, but I dunno if we’ll ever see anything like it again.

  12. Oh, and the best remix of the original theme song is right here.

    Get Carter Remix - Bombay Dub Orchestra.wmv

    Remix of Get Carter theme..Mike Hodges/Michael Caine film 1971 - Bombay Dub Orchestra

  13. I liked this when I saw it 15 years ago, but my main memory is that both this and KING POW! use the same piece of music to underscore fight scenes.

    Fred- I don’t think COP LAND was really considered a success at the time. Moderate Box Office, fairly positive but slightly mixed reviews and perhaps most of all no major awards nominations. We all know no one gains or loses weight for a role hoping for a “yeah, that was pretty good” response. To be fair his character in D-TOX does build on his character in COP LAND in some ways, and he appeared in a supporting role in indie film SHADE around this time, but nothing really took so I can see why he was still pining for his glory days.

  14. I was always thought Caine was quite proud of the original Get Carter. I can’t find the exact quote from him, but I remember it being something like: “There’s been three classic British gangster movies. I starred in one (Get Carter), Bob Hoskins starred in the second (The Long Good Friday) and we were both in the third (Mona Lisa)”.

  15. Let’s hope that’s true. He’s right, and he should be proud of that trio.

Leave a Reply





XHTML: You can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>