Jude Law gets it on in remake of Caine movie

Feelings -- abandoned feelings, hidden feelings, expressing feelings of all shades -- are at the heart of "Alfie," a movie which has absolutely no idea how to handle the feelings of its characters and least of all how to handle the feelings of its audience.\nJude Law, overflowing with a charming cockney magnetism, is a British playboy living in Manhattan, jumping from bed to car to pool table back to bed with a revolving door of women. He's a typical sweet-talking womanizer: vain, finely dressed, perennially smoking and flashing an award-winning smile as he brings the audience along for the ride by talking to us à la Ferris Bueller.\nThere are two ways to play a movie like this successfully: you either make your hero likeably redeemable or smarmy without any redemption. Director and writer Charles Shyer (who did the remakes of "Father of the Bride"), along with his co-writer Elaine Pope, want instead to strike a middle ground, making Alfie about as despicable as possible and expect the audience to feel sympathetic when he gets down on his luck. (The jury is still out on what exactly they wanted the audience to feel when we watch Alfie making out with his various co-stars Marisa Tomei, Nia Long, Sienna Miller and Susan Sarandon, because there's little interesting about it.)\n"Alfie" does provide a modicum of good news: the potential for a Best Song or Best Score Oscar for Mick Jagger, who provides a crooning, brooding British-themed soundtrack co-penned by David A. Stewart. Unfortunately for Shyer and perhaps Law, who does deliver a strong performance making with this movie what he can, Jagger and Stewart capture the mood of the movie better than the film's writers or its cinematography.\n"Alfie" is a remake of a scandalous 1966 film that admittedly I haven't seen but earned Michael Caine his first Oscar nomination for the role of Alfie. My general sense about the 1966 version is it at least got the point: your main character can't straddle a fence, wavering between charm and spite, and expect your audience to fall in and out of love with him as dumbly as the film's characters do. \nI expect most people walking into a theater to see this newer version, like me, won't know there's an original version floating around out there. But I also think most people shouldn't go see this movie either.