Gambit, review - Telegraph I've fond memories of the original Gambit (1966) as a swish Sunday-teatime caper, ideally served with crumpets. If it feels like an odd thing to remake, remember that the Coen Brothers have always been magpies: if their recent sources have varied from the unimprovable (The Ladykillers) to the rather musty (True Grit), this retro romp falls somewhere in between. Colin Firth steps into Michael Caine's brogues as Harry Deane, a flustered art curator continually at the mercy of his bullying, moneybags boss (Alan Rickman), until he decides enough's enough. Never the brightest spark, Harry concocts a massively far-fetched plan involving a fake Monet he's going to trick Rickman's Lionel Shahbandah into buying. To pull this off, he needs the help of a specific person he's never met - a yee-ha Texas rodeo queen called PJ Puznowski (Cameron Diaz), whose ancestors are meant to have purloined Monet's Haystacks, Dusk during the post-Liberation lootings. They revel, in fact, in every chance to remind us of dated lowbrow shenanigans: once Firth is teetering trouserless outside a hotel-room window ledge, the movie is nothing if not winkingly outmoded, a Pink Panther-ish bit of nonsense happening in a wholly unreal present day. A peak, or at least a hillock, of farce is reached with the eyebrow-raising innuendo of two ripely amused Savoy receptionists (Pip Torrens and Julian Rhind-Tutt, both fantastic), whose misunderstanding of what Firth means by "The Major" yields some priceless long pauses: old stuff, this, but good stuff. It's fun to see Firth letting his hair down, and the game Rickman even disrobes altogether, which is something I doubt we'd have expected from the late Herbert Lom. The weak link, sadly, is Diaz, glaringly miscast - she claims to be "of marrying age" - in a role which needed the wide-eyed likeability of an Isla Fisher. Gambit's a mixed bowl of nuts, all told, but if there's nothing in it that raises so much as a chuckle, you may need chuckling practice.