Get Carter (2000)

Get Carter arrives in 2000 as a remake of a 1971 British crime picture, and it carries the grim determination of a studio thriller with nothing on its mind beyond avenging a dead brother. Sylvester Stallone plays Jack Carter, a Las Vegas enforcer who returns to Seattle to learn that his sibling's drunk-driving death was staged. The film then tours strip clubs, surveillance tapes, and wealthy men behaving badly. It is a period piece of its own moment, a neo-noir assembled from leftover parts, and it flops with a shrug that feels earned.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. The cast is white and the production makes no effort to diversify it. There are no queer characters, no racial commentary, no environmental concern, no meditation on body image, and no neurodivergent figures. Women exist here as victims or as the spoils of male conflict. Doreen and Geraldine suffer, and the camera regards them with the same flat attention it gives a corpse. A feminist reading is available only if we squint, and the film offers none of its own.

Where the picture gestures toward a larger critique, it does so timidly. A wealthy tech mogul, Jeremy Kinnear, sits at the top of the villainous pyramid, using his money to procure women and hide his appetites. The film treats this as the crime of a single bad man, not as a symptom of anything systemic. Wealth is a plot device, not an indictment. The whole affair is a revenge machine, oiled with violence, and it asks nothing of the audience but attention. That it fails even at that is a separate matter, though not an uninteresting one.