2. Jack Carter - Get Carter (2000)
Get Carter is brilliant. Nasty, blackly-comic, iconic, boasting wonderful actors and an endlessly quotable script. Hang on, let me start again. The
original Get Carter is brilliant. Nasty, blackly-comic...you get the picture. Forever topping polls of the best British film of all time the Michael Caine version is pretty much perfect in my eyes. So why relocate it to America with an actor who puts the word lead into leading man? Oh, that's 'lead' as in the periodic table symbol Pb. Sly sleepwalks his way through the Caine role, a gangster trying to avenge his brothers death. Too dull to be an action film, too forgettable to be a proper thriller, its just a waste of everyones time and Stallone looks like he knows it, playing the character with all the depth of the kiddies paddling pool at CentreParcs. Yes, its Hollywood, but cant a few things be sacred, eh? No, they cant, so much so that they even trot Michael Caine out in a hideous cameo. They even decide to change one of the best endings in cinema if you havent seen the original, please do and then tell me how you felt as the credits rolled. Its cinema with all the edges planed off, those edges then locked in a chest of drawers which is subsequently pushed off a cliff. If you want to enjoy it, leave your mind at the door said one critic. Yes, and your eyes, ears and central nervous system too.