Please don't spend money on this.

How sad is this?

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Cape Fear (1991) - The movie directed by Martin Scorsese and acted by Robert De Niro as this is their next film after Goodfellas (1990). This film is a remake of the same titled film in 1962. The plot journey is quite slower in the first half but things getting interested when then complex started with the character of Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is looking for his revenge. I am very impressed with Robert De Niro performance since Godfather II (1974) & Taxi Driver (1976). In this film, he is fully transformed himself to a psychopath murderer. Overall, I will give 7/10 for this crime, thriller and drama.

Classic films never call for remakes, but when they do, nobody does it better than Marty. Cape Fear is one of his greats. Even after entering a new era in his career following GoodFellas, Cape Fear hearkens back to the days of Taxi Driver, in an equally bone-chilling and psychotic performance by Robert DeNiro. It's a near perfect, old Hollywood style psycho-thriller. Other than DeNiro, it is the cinematography, the editing and the music that makes the picture come alive. It has all the grit and cynicism of a Scorsese picture, with the big production values of a Spielberg picture.

To be successful, any remake of an old movie needs to establish an identity of its own. This revamp of "Cape Fear" (1962) achieves this by being a colourful widescreen production in which dramatic camera angles, extreme close-ups and a distinctive style of editing, contribute to a hyped-up sense of drama and danger that prevails throughout the whole movie. Its plot about a violent ex-con who, after being released from prison, decides to take revenge on his defence attorney, follows a very similar course to the original, but instead of being a straightforward story of good versus evil, it becomes slightly more complex because of significant changes that are made to the characters of the lawyer and his family.Saul Bass' opening credits, Bernard Herrman's original 1962 score (reworked by Elmer Bernstein) and some other striking visual techniques, make the introduction to this movie very Hitchcockian and in a nod to the original film, three of its stars, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck and Martin Balsam, are all featured in significant cameo roles.After having served 14 years in prison, Max Cady (Robert De Niro) travels to New Essex, North Carolina to take revenge on Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), the public defender who'd represented him on the rape charge which led to his imprisonment. Cady, who was illiterate at the time of the trial, spent his years in prison learning to read (literature, philosophy, law and the bible) and having discovered that Bowden had withheld information at his trial (which could possibly have won him an acquittal), blames his lawyer for his incarceration and the loss of 14 years of his life. He initially harasses Bowden and his family in fairly subtle ways that don't risk him getting into trouble with the police and it soon becomes clear that his bete noire is getting rattled.Bowden, who is now a partner in a private practice, had managed to get Cady's charge reduced from rape to criminal battery but had chosen not to divulge information he had about the victim's promiscuity because after having seen the extent of her injuries, he'd decided that Cady's crime really shouldn't go unpunished. As well as being unprofessional, Bowden is also a serial adulterer whose dysfunctional marriage has made his wife neurotic and caused his 15-year-old daughter to become troubled and insecure. As Cady's behaviour becomes increasingly threatening, Bowden turns to the police, a fellow attorney and a private investigator for help, but all of their efforts on his behalf prove to be futile because of Cady's cleverness at keeping his actions within certain boundaries. When the ex-con eventually goes beyond these limits, things change rapidly and lead to the story's final confrontation between the two men.The decision to make Bowden a flawed individual instead of the paragon of virtue that he was in the original movie, introduces some moral ambiguity into the plot and certain family dynamics which Cady is able to exploit for his own ends. Although these changes add some interesting and enjoyable new elements to the story, they do nothing to justify Cady's brutality or his misguided beliefs.Robert De Niro makes his character an extremely powerful presence throughout the whole movie. As Cady, he's convincingly sinister, diabolically vicious (when he sexually assaults one of Bowden's work colleagues) and incredibly creepy in a memorable scene that he shares with Juliette Lewis who also turns in a fantastic portrayal of Bowden's daughter. Nick Nolte shows all the anxiety, anger and frustration that Bowden feels during his ordeal as well as the overwhelming sense of guilt that haunts him because of the responsibility he feels for the terrifying experiences that his family get put through.Overall, the sheer vitality of this ramped-up remake together with some great acting, makes it worthwhile, riveting and very much, a thriller of its time.

If there's one thing that gets the blood of the cinema-goer boiling as their eyes light up with fury and anger, it's the word "remake." Or "reboot." Or "re-imagining." Or whatever other flowery terms that producers throw together to describe a former franchise reborn for new audiences. Just look at the inane controversy surrounding 2016's "Ghostbusters" reboot or the reaction to the recent strain of horror-film retreads to see audiences practically frothing at the mouth in rage over the concept of remakes of earlier classic films, whether or not the new films themselves are decent or not. But every so often, you encounter that rare diamond in the rough... a remake that is widely appreciated and beloved, and is allowed to stand on its own without negative comparison to the original source material. Those rare films that audiences embrace despite their status as remakes of old classics. Martin Scorsese's 1991 retelling of the classic thriller "Cape Fear" is most certainly one of these films. It's an excellent and tense thriller in its own right, and is never weighed down by the expectations brought about by the previous iteration. It's one of those rare remakes that people adore and enjoy, able to look past its labeling as simply a modernized version of an established story.Nick Nolte stars as Sam Bowden, a lawyer who is living with his wife and daughter (Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis), trying to rebuild his life. However, a former client named Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is released from prison, and becomes obsessed with tormenting Bowden and his family, seeking retribution for 14 years of imprisonment that he blames Bowden for, knowing that he suppressed evidence that might have lessened his sentence. Cady is cold and cunning, obsessed with vengeance and having transformed his body and mind through fanatical religious obsession and constant physical training, and seeks first to corrupt and damage everyone and everything around Bowden before targeting him for his final depraved act of vengeance. And so, Bowden and his family, torn apart from past events, must band together and work through their issues to try and stop this madman from destroying them...This very much is a film all about the performances and visual direction, where the actual storyline more-or-less takes a backseat to keen use of character and devilish aesthetics. Nolte and De Niro in particular are absolutely magnificent, and serve as just an incredible duo of adversaries to follow. Nolte's transformation from a man who is essentially a wannabe "perfect guy" into a terrified and damaged figment is just stunning, and De Niro hams it up to perfection with his fire-and-brimstone performance as a deranged, sociopathic lunatic who is just as entertaining as he is deadly. I also highly admired Juliette Lewis' role as Bowden's daughter, who becomes one of Cady's prime targets. She's exceptional, and it's honestly a shame she's not been getting as much high profile work over the past decade. I also really admired supporting roles by the likes of Joe Don Baker and original cast members Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. All play their roles to perfection despite the amount of screen time given, and all help to build up the oppressive and intense world Scorsese sculpts.Scorsese delivers one of his most stylish and devious turns as a master visual storyteller in this film, and he relishes in piling on the tension and suspense with each passing moment. I've always highly admired Scorsese, even if I've only really seen a handful of his films. He's one of the great minds in cinema and he never delivers anything less than stellar in terms of storytelling. Here, he goes full-on into the insanity with a child-like glee, tossing and turning and tilting the camera whenever he can and expertly using a keen mixture of extreme close-up and wide-shots within every given seen to craft slow- building senses of paranoia and claustrophobia. But he never pushes it too far, and it always organically builds off of the scene and the emotional state of the characters he's exploring at a given moment. And he knows precisely when to slow it down or ramp it up, giving us a varied but also harrowing and entertaining experience in terror.Were I to lodge any complaints against the film, it would be that fundamentally, it's a bit overstretched and loses some steam in its second half, with a slower pacing that doesn't always match the manic energy of the performances and Scorsese's visual aesthetic. It feels as though a good 10 to 15 minutes of screen time are spent on meandering long-shots and sequences that could easily have been condensed together. Case in point is a prolonged sequence involving a sting operation lead by Joe Don Baker's Claude Kersek, with could have been pretty seamlessly cut down to a much more startling and impactful scene if its editing was a bit more abbreviated. Still, this is only a minor complaint against an otherwise exceptional thriller.As it stands, "Cape Fear" is definitely amongst the ranks of "The Thing" and "The Fly" as one of the more startling and high-quality remakes to come out of the Hollywood system. It's an intense and often terrifying feature that stands proud alongside the original as a valid and important retelling. And I think it's a film that's very much well worth experiencing for fans of terror and pure, emotional suspense. And so, I give it an excellent 9 out of 10.