The original version was one of many excellent films from the seventies, truly one of cinema's greatest decades. You don't remake The Sting, The Godfather, Cabaret,The Exorcist, Deliverance or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest so why remake Papillon? The new version is honest and worthy but it's flat and it's bland and if it wasn't for the efforts of Hunnam and Malek in the two principle roles then the film would be barely watchable. They don't have a lot to work with script wise and the direction is all over the place.What did director Michael Noer do previously to earn a stab at this ? I am not sure . Some scenes seem to copy faithfully scenes from the original so you know what's coming before it happens but when they do depart from the original it doesn't work either,for example compare the opening of the original against that of this remake where you see a little background of events leading up to Papillon's arrest and imprisonment. It wasn't necessary to show it. This film appears to be based on the original film lock stock and barrel instead of maybe venturing into the pages of the two enormous novels that Charriere wrote about his years in captivity. You feel the level of suffering much more in the original than this remake and I felt the black and white footage and photos that end the film conveyed the horrors of being in captivity much more than the preceding two hours.After the cruelly underrated Lost City of Z and this Hunnam will continue to see his stock rise and Malek already has his Oscar .I'd like to remember this film as being part of these two actors journey in cinema rather than it being a good remake of a seventies classic which it falls way short of.
Review of Papillon
