Butler's Cinema Scene

Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek

“PAPILLON” My rating: C

136 minutes | MPAA rating: R

There are moments in the new “Papillon” when Brit actor Charlie Hunnam looks so much like the late Steve McQueen that it’s startling.

McQueen, the cinema’s King of Cool throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, starred in the original 1973 film version of Henri Charriere’s best-selling memoir about surviving and escaping from a hellish penal colony in French Guiana. For all of McQueen’s arresting screen presence (and a strong supporting performance from Dustin Hoffman), that Franklin Schaffer-directed adventure was a snooze.

So is this remake.

Still, Hunnam looks so right in the role that one wishes he was making better choices in his projects and directors.

He showed his Yankee bona fides by playing the hunkily charismatic heir to a California motorcycle gang in cable’s long-running “Sons of Anarchy” (aka “Hamlet on Harleys”), but his movie resume has been all over the map, from the low-keyed and under appreciated jungle adventure “The Lost City of Z” to the overblown and nearly unwatchable “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.”  His best films, ironically, have been those in which he played minor character parts: “Children of Men,” “Green Street Hooligans,” “Cold Mountain.”

This “Papillon,” scripted by Aaron Guzikowski and directed by Michael Noer, looks plenty expensive, what with its massive set of a tropical prison and hundreds of extras slaving away like Hebrews building the pyramids.

But on the two vital points on which Charriere’s story pivots — his daring escape attempts and his refusal to break under inhuman treatment — the film loses steam and momentum and ends up drifting in the doldrums.

Unlike the McQueen version, which started in the prison colony, this film lays out Charriere’s background as a Parisian safecracker, accomplished lover and all around bon vivant. He’s double-crossed by his criminal cohorts, who frame him for murder, and he’s sentenced to life.

The film follows him on the long ocean voyage on a prison ship packed to the ceiling with human refuse. It’s here that he meets and cultivates the friendship of bespectacled Louis Dega (“Mr. Robot’s” Rami Malek in the Hoffmann role), a notorious forger.  Charierre — known as Papillon for the butterfly tattoo on his chest –realizes that the runty Dega has a small fortune hidden in his rectum; he offers his protection and in return Dega will underwrite our hero’s escape efforts.

Twice Papillon makes a break for freedom. Twice he is returned to face ever more agonizing punishments.  He spends years in solitary confinement; after his second escape he and Dega are sent to an island prison so small and isolated that there aren’t even bars on the windows. There’s nothing to escape to but shark-infested waters.

And still he perseveres.

“Papillon” is meant to be a tribute to an undefeatable human spirit, but the film never finds the dramatic juice to sell us on the idea.  Director Noer keeps us at arm’s length and the yarn’s potential drifts away.

| Robert W. Butler