No, it’s not. That’s the answer to the obvious question that will be asked about whether or not Michael Noer’s remake of Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman’s classic “Papillon” is as good as the original. It’s not even close. In fact, it’s hard not to be offended at nearly every decision made in this version, in which screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (“Prisoners”), working from the credited screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr., crassly reconfigures the story into a cliché of something with contemporary commercial viability. It’s exactly what you’ve expected and feared, as this new iteration loses Franklin J. Schnaffer’s wonderfully constructed story about friendship forged through survival and loyalty, into your standard prison picture, which compresses storylines, and grafts on extra nudity and graphic violence.
The only major deviation from the 1973 film comes from the opening, which whisks viewers away to 1931 Paris, where safecracker Papillon (Charlie Hunnam) is living the good life with his girlfriend (a wasted Eve Hewson). The criminal makes good money pulling lucrative jobs for a gangland boss, but winds up framed for murder, when he attempts to keep some of the loot for himself.
After this brief and superfluous additional sequence, which does very little to expand on the titular character, the film largely tells the story you know: condemned to a penal colony in French Guiana, Papillon forges an alliance with counterfeiter Louis Dega (Rami Malek), who will underwrite an escape attempt in exchange for protection from the rest of population, who are eager to cut him open and grab the money he’s managed to smuggle in. However, the exchange of goods for services rendered blossoms into a tight friendship as the pair endure the unforeseen horrors that await them in the French colony.
Perhaps it’s not fair to critique Noer’s picture against its predecessor, but it’s hard not to when “Papillon” is almost fascinatingly wrong-footed at every turn in following the playbook of the 1970s picture. An entire review could be spent cataloging the various missteps in this modern take, but they all fall into a larger failure to grasp what made the first adaptation of Henri Charriere’s memoir so powerful, and even moving. While Schnaffer’s picture was about the endurance of the human spirt and body, it also captured the desolation these prisoners faced, shipped off to another continent, where they were anonymous numbers in a system that hardly cared whether they lived or died. But not only were the convicted captive to the penal colony, so too were the guards, who were corruptible, and trying to survive the unpleasant working conditions in their own way. All of this was patiently unfolded and carefully laid out, particularly in the first half hour of the 1973 movie, as it established not just the unforgiving world those being shipped to South America were about to face, but the harsh geography that surrounded them, as beautiful as it was deadly.
That’s all absent here as Guzikowski renders this story into every prison movie you’ve seen before, complete with naked shower fights (yes, Hunnam’s butt makes an appearance, perhaps to counterbalance the jazz age boobs in the early part of the movie; in either case, both feel cheaply tossed into the picture). The most fatal misunderstanding in the material comes in the complexity of the bond that forms between Papillon and Degas. Without spoiling anything, Papillon’s courageous and selfless act to spare Degas from brutal retribution from the warden is turned into a hero’s act that only has the coincidental consequence of benefitting the counterfeiter. This entire sequence, which plays out far longer and to greater effect in the original, is condensed here, with Papillon and Degas’ eventual reunion becoming an opportunity for a quippy one-liner and little else.
Hunnam, an actor who tends to live or die based on the material he’s working with (he’s terrific in this spring’s “The Lost City Of Z”), is mostly just a hunky, chiseled vessel for the otherwise empty “Papillon.” His Papillon is big, brawny and confident and with that comes little worry that he’ll eventually succeed in his mission. There’s no sense of vulnerability or risk in his actions, or even the possibility that his obsession to escape might be a slowly growing delusion. The character is streamlined to the point of stripping Papillon of any dimension. As for Malek, he hardly fares much better, as his performance comes off as a pale imitation of Hoffman’s turn, with far less heart. In fact, his Degas even gets to stand his ground in fights on a couple of occasions, in yet another strange twist on the material, which only undermines how much he needs Papillon both as a friend and protector.
Even if Noer and Guzikowski had completed an identical redo — shot for shot, and line by line — the results still wouldn’t have measured up. The sweat-soaked, grimy, widescreen spectacle Schaffer employed is rendered with almost television like slickness here. There is little sense of the vastness of the prison compound and operations or the swampy sensation of being in the West Indies; the sets here are remarkably dull, the atmosphere non-existent. And try as he might, composer David Buckley’s bland score hardly has a chance against the terrific work of Jerry Goldsmith.
With no unique viewpoint on the story of its own, it’s perplexing why “Papillon” went in front of cameras at all. It’s hard not to leave the film with a sour feeling, as at almost every turn, it feels like you’re reading a script note from some executive, who wants a beefier, simpler movie with more literal guts on the floor. And so, that’s what you get, but instead of a fellow prisoner that’s been shivved, it’s most certainly the original movie that’s been eviscerated. [D]
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