Review: 'Cape Fear' reinvents itself again with chilling, charming Javier Bardem

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Cape Fear,” premiering Friday on Apple TV, is a 10-episode limited series remake of a 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of a 1962 film adapted from John D.MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners,” and as in a game of telephone each subsequent version adds new material and moves a little farther from the original.

(The credits to the series, created by Nick Antosca, note all previous sources and screenwriters.) Thirty-four years having passed since the last go-round, we are treated to such modern advances as catfishing, drones, deep fakes, social media and pushy true-crime podcasters.In each iteration, a family is menaced by a recently released ex-con who blames one or more of them for his incarceration.Antosca fills his extra-long take on the material with complications and inventions; though the series is also chock full of borrowings from and allusions to its predecessors — you can hardly call them Easter eggs, lying there as they do in plain sight.

(And sound: Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein‘s earlier scores share space with Jeff Russo’s new one.)In every version, the antagonist is a now-charming, now-menacing psychopath named Max Cady (Javier Bardem), memorably played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991.In the novel and movies, Cady was serving time for rape; here it’s for the murder of his wife and unborn child, when new evidence suddenly springs him from prison after 17 years.

We are invited to suspect this evidence from the very beginning, though this suspicion will itself become suspect.“Or is it?” is a question you’ll be prompted to ask through the series.The objects of Cady’s slow-boiling vengeance — seemingly — are married lawyers Tom (Patrick Wilson) and Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), sharing the position previously represented solely by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte in turn.

Anna, who had unsuccessfully represented Cady, ironica...