Presumed Innocent: Remake of the great legal thriller has more sex but still manages to be less sexy

John Ford’s Stagecoach was done perfectly in 1939. Orson Welles realised this, which is why he watched the film more than 40 times in preparation for making his directorial debut with Citizen Kane two years later.

Nobody would ever dare to remake Citizen Kane. Like Stagecoach, Welles’s film is also regarded as cinematic perfection. And yet, someone was stupid enough to remake Stagecoach in 1966.

Plenty of people still watch Ford’s Stagecoach today, but the remake has been all but forgotten, and deservedly so. Because you can’t improve upon perfection. But Hollywood, damn it, just keeps on trying and failing.

The latest failure is Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+, first two episodes streaming now), an eight-part miniseries based on Scott Turow’s 1987 novel.

It’s a legal thriller about Rusty Sabitch, a prosecutor and right-hand man to the Chicago DA, who finds himself accused of the rape and murder of a colleague called Carolyn Polhemus, with whom he once had a passionate affair.

Rusty’s wife Barbara knows about the affair, but the couple have long since reconciled. Rusty, however, remained obsessed with Carolyn right up to her death.

Presumed Innocent was turned into a film in 1990 and was a huge critical and commercial success. It might not have been Stagecoach or Citizen Kane, but in terms of what it was and what it set it out to achieve, it was perfectly done.

Mind you, it had plenty of things going for it: Harrison Ford, at his box-office peak, as Rusty; Greta Scaacchi as Carolyn; Bonnie Bedelia as Barbara, plus a brilliant supporting cast that included Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia and Paul Winfield.

The screenplay was by Frank Pierson, who wrote Dog Day Afternoon, the film was directed by Alan J Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men) and the cinematographer was the incomparable Gordon Willis, who gave The Godfather and The Godfather Part II their distinctive look.

Presumed Innocent the miniseries has none of these things, and nothing capable of replacing them.

Rusty is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. For someone who lit up the screen in Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain and Night Crawler, he’s strangely flat and underwhelming here.

Rusty in the film wasn’t an especially sympathetic character; as played by Gyllenhaal, he’s not remotely interesting either.

You can say the same for Ruth Negga as Barbara and Renate Reinsve, who plays Carolyn (mainly in flashback, though also her hog-tied on the floor at the crime scene or laid out on the coroner’s slab). She never conveys why, in the way the electrifying Scaacchi did, a man like Rusty might lose his mind and nearly his marriage over her.

The funny thing about this Presumed Innocent is that there’s more sex, yet it’s far less sexy than the original

The funny thing about this Presumed Innocent is that there’s more sex, yet it’s far less sexy than the original.

The film took a 500-page novel and compressed it into two gripping, drum-tight hours of cinema. The miniseries does the opposite; it stretches and drags the story across six hours, give or take.

In order to fill out the running time, subplots have been added, there’s more of Rusty and Barbara’s home life, and far too much time is give over to Rusty’s therapy sessions.

I can’t say yet whether the terrific final twist has been retained, although a few new red herrings that weren’t in the original have been added.

The whole thing is bloated and often boring — a limited series, as the Americans call it, that’s nowhere near as limited as it should be.

All the problems with this version of Presumed Innocent stem from the man in charge, super-showrunner David E Kelley. It comes with the same slick, glossy soullessness of another of his miniseries, the murder mystery-cum-domestic drama The Undoing.

Kelley would probably justify this remake/revamp by pointing out that the film was made 34 years ago, and who watches 34-year-old films?

Well, probably the same people who watch 85-year-old ones like Stagecoach.

Great films live in the memory forever. Bad TV remakes are soon forgotten.

​Episode three of ‘Presumed Innocent’ is released on June 19 on Apple TV+