Genre

Once in a blue moon, though, there’s a re-make that not only takes the original to a new level of appreciation, but actually improves upon it. In musical terms, it’s Ike and Tina’s “Proud Mary.” In the cinematic forum, Martin Scorsese’s 1991 re-work of the B-movie thriller Cape Fear is another.

Max Cady (Robert DeNiro, lost the Oscar to Anthony Hopkins) is a recent parolee, fresh out of the joint after serving a fourteen year stretch for aggravated assault. During his trial, his lawyer, public...defender Samuel Bowden (Nick Nolte, the rich man’s Gary Busey) had pled the charge down from rape and aggravated sexual battery, which could have earned Cady a death sentence. Why, then, would Cady have such a vendetta toward the man who may have saved his life? In his fourteen years in prison, Cady has basically done two things: covered his body in tattoos, mostly scriptural and threatening in nature, and learned to read law books. After his conviction, he dismissed Bowden and acted as his own attorney and found something in his file that he feels Sam buried, and has since focused every fiber of his being on one final goal: to make his lawyer pay for the fourteen years he lost. As soon as he is released, Cady immediately sets about getting his long-planned revenge with an almost Ahab-ian fervor, making Bowden and his family the white whale, the perpetrator of his anguish.