When you think of a director doing a movie for the money or the chance to make another film he really wants to make, you generally think of someone going through the motions, lack passions. Although he never explicitly said so, it often thought that Cape Fear was an commercial effort made either to pay back Universal for financing his dream project, The Last Temptation of Christ, or to show that he could direct a hit in order to make more "personal" material like his next film, The Age of Innocence, or both. The surprising thing about Cape Fear is that it's actually worse than a by-the-numbers, phoned in effort- it like the work of a film student who has unending passion, but no judgment. It is so ridiculously over the top that it would be laughable if it were not so damn boring. The problem is not that is commercial (lots of great movies are), it's that it's stupid.
The movie is of course a remake of the original Cape Fear, an extremely minor classic directed by J. Lee Thompson, the British filmmaker best known for The Guns of Navarone and the last two Planet of the Apes movies. I didn't like the original very much and Scorsese is certainly a better director than Thompson, but the latter's film is so superior it's not even a close comparison. The first movie was just plain boring, Scorese's is boring, obnoxious AND moronic.
Both films are extremely similar in plot and structure. The remake is more like the original on steroids than a new script or take on the novel by John D. MacDonald that the screenplays are adapted from. Florida prosecutor Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is dismayed to learn that convicted rapist Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is being released from prison after fourteen years. Cady blames Bowden for his prison sentence, and decides to make Bowden's life hell, harassing his wife (Jessica Lange), "courting" his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and threatening to expose and affair he's been having. The bookish Bowden is unable to defend himself within the law, so he takes his annoying family and a private investigator (Joe Dawn Baker) to an isolated location in Cape Fear, North Carolina, where of course Cady follows.
Comparing the two films, similar as they are, it seems as if Scorsese figured that he could make the movie more exciting if he just made it more violent-lots more violent. In the first movie, Max Cady was a deplorable person, but he was indeed something approaching human. In Scorsese's film, Cady is something like a less cultured version of Hannibal Lector. He is a supervillain. He is uneducated but knows the law well enough to avoid getting arrested for his behavior, even though I have a hard time believing that a prosecutor would have a hard time getting people to believe that a convicted violent sex offender is a danger to him. To explain how Cady gets away with all is very implausible. Isn't he on parole? Shouldn't a parole officer be checking up on him? How does this guy have the personal skills to mentally seduce Bowden's daughter (in a completely unconvincing scene), and what does she see in this creep three times her age?
The movie is like a novel written entirely in capitol letters and with on exclamation points as punctuation. HEY LOOK! MAX CADY, IS REALLY, REALLY REALLY BAD!!!! The music, re-arranged from the original, is used to punctuate everything as to clue the audience into the fact that the movie is REALLY, REALLY SCARY!!! The addition of the subplot about Bowden's affair doesn't work either and is unnecessary. The original pitted classic nice guy Gregory Peck against Robert Mitchum (both have cameos in the remake), here we have a sleazeball vs. Satan incarnate. There's no one to root for. And then, like most that turn the knob to eleven, it just gets boring, and the endless fight at the end of the film where Bowden survives things that would kill both Dracula and the Frankenstien monster, is unforgivable.
It seems a rule that most great directors have to make at least one really awful movie- Spielberg made The Color Purple, Coppola made Jack, Herzog made Fata Morgana, Stone made Alexander, Altman made Popeye and Scorsese has made Cape Fear. This is even worse than New York, New York, and feels longer.
Cape Fear (1991)