Famed English playwright Harold Pinter is getting on in age, and in recent years he has sometimes been ailing. He recently told a reporter that he’ll turn out no more plays.

Over the last 40-odd years he’s had another, fairly busy career in motion pictures, writing (beginning with Joseph Losey’s The Servant in 1963), acting (Mansfield Park, e.g.) and even directing one film (Butley). And now he’s the writer of a new, second film version of Anthony Shaffer’s early 1970s play, Sleuth. The first one, in 1972, was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz from Shaffer’s own screenplay.

Sleuth was a rambunctious, showy and shallow entertainment, intended as a complicated but easily accessible pas de deux of two actors. It was a fairly engaging piece of bogus, high-toned pulp drama.

In it, a prominent aging mystery author (Laurence Olivier in the film) invites a younger, working-class man (Michael Caine) who’s been sleeping with the writer’s wife to his country estate, ostensibly to work things out. The writer proposes they collaborate in an insurance fraud in order to secure what each man wants: money for the writer to shed his wife and go off with his mistress, and funds for the young man to marry and support his expensive mistress.

This is all a sham, one intended to trap the younger rival in a humiliating defeat. The play and the first film are about potentially lethal gamesmanship; they are exercises in happy theatrical ostentation.

The new film, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is almost like a refutation of the original, and the responsibility is mostly Pinter’s, at least technically, anyway. The project was initiated by Jude Law, who has taken Caine’s part in this one. (Caine is now in Olivier’s role.) He’s the film’s producer and he took the idea for a remake to Pinter. He must have known what he was getting; the playwright is a well-known quantity.

There’s a supposedly clever exchange in the new film when the snobbish writer, referring to his own work, asks his visitor if he knows what an adaptation is. The question poses a probably unintentional irony: Pinter’s long career has included notable adaptations that have gone bust. He was famously defeated by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when he wrote a screenplay for Elia Kazan’s movie version of the novel. His work on Karel Reisz’s version of John Fowles’ novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was crudely reductive, muddled and charmless.

As a playwright, Pinter is a sort of withholding formalist. He deals in rhythmic dialogue exchanges, questions and repetitions that can portray a clipped querulousness, interrupted by crucial pauses. He establishes a sense of muted or delayed aggression, of obscure menace. Most often, all this doesn’t lead to anything like a decisive dramatic climax. Climax and catharsis aren’t where Pinter wants to go.

If Law wanted to revise Sleuth as a still-workable retread, he made a serious mistake engaging Pinter. Pinter and Shaffer aren’t just on different pages; they operate with much different dramatic alphabets and vocabularies. Pinter is interested in ambience, and structures of personal conflict, without much regard for backstory or developing situations. (He can do this very well sometimes, as in Losey’s Accident 40 years ago.) Shaffer’s Sleuth is nothing if not its situations. Pinter and Branagh have drained it of its juice, excised its theatrical flamboyance. Their film is a work of arch, jaundiced ennui and ominous but ill-explained nastiness.

What they’ve attempted was probably not really feasible but they’ve handicapped themselves by abbreviating the original. Their film is a good three quarters of an hour shorter than Mankiewicz and Shaffer’s. Branagh has accommodated and enhanced Pinter’s shortcomings. Perhaps he intended to give the stylized material a charge with baroquely showy technique, but all he really accomplished was to further vitiate the remaining dramatic potential. The film is a visual welter of annoyingly oblique camera angles, weirdly and sometimes unintentionally amusing compositions. (In one shot, he films Caine and Law with both of their heads cropped off as they stand side-by-side.) He’s “updated” the work by showing a lot of the action captured by remote control cameras on monitors and computer screens placed around the set (itself a sterile Star Trek vision in which almost no one would willingly dwell).

And near the end, the vehicle goes off its tracks by introducing an arbitrary homoerotic device that’s both very odd and off-putting. It’s as if Branagh and Pinter were in a hurry to wrap things up. (At least this lines up with the thread of misogyny they’ve worked in, a not unusual facet of Pinter’s work.)

Caine actually manages to come up with something that resembles an able performance amidst all the arch posturing and visual clutter. It makes you wonder what he could have done with better material. Law seems to have been more frustrated in his efforts. Branagh has left him unmoored and inconsistent.

The original Sleuth was thin but its extravagant tricks and hamminess weren’t devoid of fun and some shallow wit. This one comes off as mannered, creepy attitude.