There are not many changes in the re-make of Sabrina, it's surprisingly faithful, but with a longer runtime and the conventions of modern filmmaking, we get better defined characters, with more understandable actions.
I'll say this right now, I rarely dislike watching Harrison Ford, so I have a bias there. If Harrison Ford appeared in the original Sabrina I might have liked it more, although, he would have be about ten years old, I think. Greg Kinnear does a nice job also, even if his role did seem a little scaled back. Julia Ormond is stunning and manages to bring more depth to the shallow character of Sabrina. That is thanks, in part, to the more fleshed out character moments. We still are not really sure why such a prize like Sabrina would pine away for David Larrabee, but this version does make Sabrina look a little more sensible. Along with the lead actors we get a very capable group of fine character actors, to round out the cast.
For the most part my sentiments for the previous version apply here as well, it is a pretty exact remake. Sabrina is a goofy little romance movie, that owes much to the genre films that came before it. It doesn't do much new but what it's doing is handled as well as you can expect.
To say I liked this newer Sabrina sounds like more of an endorsement than it really is. We are still talking about a romance here, and I have a hard time enjoying this type of movie. With the attempts to give more depth to the characters and explain why they are doing the things they are doing, I give Sydney Pollak (director, along with the writers of course) some credit. It ends up being rooted a bit more in reality, which is a positive for me (but a negative for others.) As a trade off, however, it seems to lose much of the charm of the original. Not a perfect deal but it worked for me in this case.
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