Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Sam Bowden is a small-town corporate attorney. Max Cady is a tattooed, cigar-smoking, Bible-quoting, psychotic rapist. What do they have in common? 14 years ago, Sam was a public defender assigned to Max Cady's rape trial, and he made a serious error: he hid a document from his illiterate client that could have gotten him acquitted. Now, the cagey Cady has been released, and he intends to teach Sam Bowden and his family a thing or two about loss.
Scorsese's Cape Fear remake is elevated far above its B-movie thriller premise by De Niro's ferociously committed, Oscar-nominated performance as Max Cady — a genuinely terrifying, almost mythological villain. The cinematography is boldly stylized, with Scorsese and Schoonmaker using saturated colors, distorted lenses, and Bernard Herrmann's reworked score to create an oppressive, almost expressionist dread. The plot, however, is a familiar revenge-against-family thriller that gains moral complexity from the attorney's own culpability but never fully escapes its genre scaffolding. As a remake, Novelty is somewhat constrained — Scorsese's stylistic bravura is distinctive but the structural bones are inherited. The climactic houseboat sequence is viscerally intense but goes on long enough to tip into excess, preventing the ending from landing as cleanly as the film deserves.