No.139 : The Double (2011)

The Double at the IMDb

Have you ever seen a spy film? If the answer is ‘Yes’ then you have already seen large chunks of ‘The Double’.

Richard Gere stars as Paul, a retired agent who spent 20 years trying to track down arch bad guy, Cassius. He’s called back into action when Cassius’ signature garrote murder technique is used to kill off a senator. Young whizz kid analyst, Topher Grice, is teamed up with the reluctant Gere to try and finally nail the bad guy.

Of course Gere is reluctant at first, but soon the young agent wins his grudging respect. With occasional input from an embarrassed looking Martin Sheen, playing a sector chief , the unlikely and mismatched duo start to fit the case together.

But wait! Can it be so straight forward? Will ‘the double’ of the title refer to a lookalike or maybe a double agent? Is everyone the person they say they are? Is anyone?

This was a really terrible thriller that made no sense at all, and had such unwieldy pot turns you’d think that the writers were plucking random ideas out of a big bowl and sticking them together to make a script.

The film opens with a scene of some Mexican migrants getting killed off for no apparent reason. Maybe it was lifted from a Trump election broadcast? It’s brought up later on but just as a minor plot point not the pivotal event that the scene suggests.

Gere is the clichéd, jaded ex-agent reluctant to get back on the job and even less keen to take a rookie under his wing. Topher offers little as greenhorn agent Ben, who starts out in awe of Gere but after a few scenes in his company stars to smell a rat - or was it a hamster?

The initial wrong foot was decently handled, but in retrospect it couldn’t have gone any other way. Who is the shadowy villain? Well you only have two choices and the title is a bit of a giveaway. As it is, we get wrong footed twice but not in a satisfying manner - in a ‘that doesn’t make a lick of sense’ kind of way.

The film probably sneaked a release on the back of its star names, but everyone looks disinterested and, apart from one decent car crash, there is nothing memorable about this film at all.

The same 'wire from the watch' murder gets carried out so often, you’d think the prop must have been rented for the weekend and they had to get as much use out of it as possible.

The characters are as thin as a steamrolled pizza with the female  parts being especially weak. Topher’s wife has nothing to do apart from simper a lot and fail to fall off a ladder.

Gere wins no empathy points at all and is downright creepy in places. In one scene at a pee-wee baseball game a lady asks him which kid is his. Gere say none, he just likes to watch. Why child services weren’t immediately called, I don’t know.

The film saunters to a low rent showdown in a warehouse with outrageous revelations being piled on top of a steaming load of unlikely events.

I’m not 100% sure who was doing what to whom at the end, but that’s OK - none of the characters did either.

THE Tag line - Double your fun - watch a party election broadcast instead.

33%

No.138 : The Colony (2015)

The Colony at the IMDb

My regular reader will remember that we have already reviewed a film called ‘The Colony' way back in Episode 114.

Fear not, no repeats on this channel, unless you are talking about the jokes. This is an entirely different ’The Colony’ and stars her off the Harry Potters. Which is the best Colony? Well read and find out. (it’s the other one).

Hermione plays an air stewardess  heading to Chile. The airline isn’t named and her nationality isn’t revealed so I’m guessing she’s English given no attempts are made at an accent. This is one of these inspired by true events’ films so they can basically make up what they like. Hernione, or ‘Lena’ to give her name in this is, paying a bootie call to her German boyfriend (Daniel Bruhl) whose character is conveniently called Daniel.

Daniel (the character) is a political activist and keeps himself busy designing posters for revolutionaries and attending rallies. Lena spots him from the airport bus and soon they are back at his apartment having very modest foo-foo. Their four days of delight are cut short when a military coup begins (well it is 1973) and they get rounded up. A man with a bag on his head grasses Daniel up and he gets carted off to the ‘Colony of Dignity’.

Lena makes some enquiries and after two minutes she is at the gate of said colony resplendent in a grey cardigan, a crucifix and slut shoes. They don’t do anything in the way of background checks at The Colony and she is immediately put to work peeling spuds. Daniel meanwhile is tired about being tortured all the time and pretends that the electric shocks have made him a mentalist. HUGE mistake. Next day the military show up and ask for a subject to test out the poison gas that The Colony is mixing up for them - and Daniel is the prime candidate.

Despite segregation the two manage to meet up and make plans to escape. Will they get away in an ending ripped off from ‘Argo’ or will they remain captive? (It’s the first one).

This was a decent enough film that passed the time but was in no way memorable or as statement making as it thought. Half an hour in they started a ‘Day 1’ caption that went up to Day 132. Although some were skipped it felt like we lived them all. There was no real point to this timetable as most of the stuff happened at the start or in the last few days.

The Colony was quite well realised but ‘The Cult’ would have been more appropriate - maybe they wanted to avoid confusion with the band? The cruel overlords led by Michael Nyqvist were good in a boo-hiss sense with his nastiness later being replaced by him being a total nonce. Boo hiss indeed.

Hermione was decent, but clearly the star of the show - even in the work camp she had nicely fitted blouses and platted hair to die for. She was also a bit stiff in the love scenes, with her main motivation being to keep the sheet as close to her chest as possible. Obviously this blog isn’t looking for titillation, but it does take you out of the scene when the character is coy about showing her boobs to the boyfriend she hasn’t seen for weeks. The Potter fan boys do get a couple of thrills especially when Lena is ordered to remove her blouse. A few expelianiouses in the fan boy pants there, I bet!

The eventual escape from the colony was a bit easy and the flight from Chile was too familiar. The closing captions said that basically nothing changed following the events of this film, which isn’t surprising as it appears to have been mostly made up. Worth a look, but no where near as much fun as the other ’The Colony’.

The Tag Line : 132 days of torture 55%

No.137 : The Bargee (1964)

The Bargee at the IMDb

I found this film on an obscure satellite channel and it does seem something of an unknown given it has fewer than 300 ratings on IMDb. This is a bit of a surprise given the stellar British cast and the writing team of Galton & Simpson who gave us Steptoe & Son and Hancock, starring Will Smith. Having viewed the film however, I am happy to let it resubmerge itself in the canal of mediocrity. It was really dull and apart from a game of ‘it’s that guy out of…’ it doesn’t have much to offer.

Part of that is down to the era in which it was made. Released in 1964 things hadn’t quite started swinging in the sixties yet, and the glory days of the 1970’s sex comedy starring Robin Asquith were still many years away. This one does try to be a bit cheeky and risqué but it gets bogged down in a moral maze and a selection of house coats that are anything but sexy.

Anyway our hero Hemel  as played by Harry H. Corbett, is named solely for a weak joke about being born in Hemel Hemstead - this allowed for an obvious zinger  about being born somewhere else with an even worse name and this weak gag meant he was stuck with the unlikely moniker for the rest of the film.

Hemel works the canals, slowly transporting goods up and down the country, with his cleverly named cousin Ronnie, played by Ronnie Barker. Where do they get their ideas?! There is a prescient scene at the start where the man at the docks says that the industry is winding down and that a young man like Hemel (Corbett was 39 at the time and looks 50) should get out now. This advice falls on deaf ears as Hemel has a power of shagging to do. Or ‘get some dinners’ as they coyly put it.

He has a girl at every lock and sends postcards ahead to them heralding his visits. All the girls think they are the one and are desperate for the oily rag and bone, er,  canal man to marry them. Ronnie is not so lucky and bemoans that he always gets the ugly ones. Mirrors were not in common use until 1965. Hemel’s first date goes wrong when the ‘beautiful girl’ he plans on meeting is in fact an ancient looking bar maid with a massive bouffant. Hemel gets his dinner but when she finds out about his other girls she chases him up the canal as his boat put-puts along at 2 m.p.h.

The long dull stretches of sailing up the canals and navigating locks are made even more dull with their encounters with Eric Sykes who plays an annoying man in a cabin cruiser. He plays the part well; that is to say he is really annoying in every scene he is in.

The film slowly meanders to the main action which involves Hemel getting a girl and Ronnie taking care of her over protective Dad down the pub. After they leave we learn the girl is pregnant and the Dad starts a siege at the lock. Soon the entire occupancy of The garret Club has shown up and our likely lads are nearing the lock on their return journey. Will Hemel come clean and start a new life away from his boats? Or will the new wife add to her general humiliation and set sail with him?

This film started OK but it spluttered to a halt as soon as Eric Sykes hoved into view, and never got back into gear again. The values of the film were all over the shop - I guessed the men were supposed to like Hemel and envy his free and easy life style. As it was he just came across as an unlikeable creep. Barker was poor too as the illiterate cousin who needs the captions on his girlie mags read out to him. His part was wafer thin and you can see why he started to write his own stuff.

The saving grace of the film was in the bit parts with people like Derek Nimmo, Richard Briers, Arthur off ’On the Buses’ and Mr Barraclough all showing up in a variety of stereotype roles.

The pacing of the film was awful with lots of scenes running well beyond their sell by date. The siege at the lock went on for so long that one of the characters had to go for a crap half way through!

At nearly two hours there was probably enough here for a decent one hour TV episode - adverts included. It was a bit of an oddity with a sex crazed deviant having to work against 60’s censorship and ankle length skirts, and failing miserably to offer any titillation whatsoever.


THE Tagline : Don’t touch this with a ten foot bargee pole. 45%

No.136 : The Apocalypse (2007)

The Apocalypse at the IMDb

This film only garners a measly 1.7/10 on the IMDb across 2600 reviews so it must be worth watching, even if only for the odd ironic chuckle. Sadly it fails even on this front and, even worse, it even tries to gets some Christian values in your face to boot!

We open with five young people sitting around a campfire discussing their relationships. Once decides to go for a piss - HUGE mistake - as he is instantly flattened by a meteorite. The rest panic and flee, with another hapless youth falling into a large lava pit and disappearing.

We cut to our hero, Jason, a USDA Ranger, whatever that is - not a cop, but he has blue lights on his truck. He’s called to the station by a colleague who doesn’t tell him what to expect. He arrives to find the station under a large meteorite - well, he didn’t expect that! As the two look at the carnage, slightly non-plussed it has to be said, another meteorite flies overhead and destroys the city of Monterrey. Even this doesn’t elicit much of a reaction and certainly no pressure wave, fall out etc. To be fair there is a handful of ashes that fall from the sky, but that’s not much to show for the 100,000 reported dead.

Meanwhile down in L.A. four hot girls are watching the carnage erupt on TV. One of them, Lindsay, is the daughter of Jason and is failing to contact her mother Ashley who is the ex-wife of Jason. Keeping up? Eventually Mom makes contact and she and Jason agree to head south to meet up with the daughter - they have heard that the world only has four days left as an ‘extinction starter’ meteor is on the way. This is described as being the size of Texas - strange that ‘Armageddon’ used the same comparison - I guess its like us comparing things to the size of Wales.

As the ‘action’ takes place we are aware of strange events happening. No, not that this guff secured funding, but that people are disappearing. It’s almost like the actors are getting called back to their regular jobs at McDonalds. The once couple, Jason and Ashley, head off on their perilous road trip which is full of dangers such as land slides, tornadoes and tsunamis, which thankfully for the budget, mostly happen off camera. Even the rescue helicopter is heard and not seen - someone must have spent that day’s budget on a cup of coffee.

As they near L.A. the disappearances start to increase and Lindsay’s boyfriend is spirited away from his bath tub hidey hole by a very localised tornado in a crescendo of religious music - only to be found outside five minutes later in a wrong foot that fooled no one - more religion is coming! Soon it’s down to just Dad to find his daughter before the big one hits - will he find her? Let us pray!

I should have been altered to the likely quality of this film when I saw Asylum’s logo on the credits. They are famous for piggybacking big Hollywood films with cheap copycats and this is no different - apart from the added extra of plenty of religious stuff.

You can’t expect much, and on that front it certainly delivers. You will have never seen any of the cast in anything else and this film appears to have killed any acting careers they may of had stone dead - and rightly so. Some characters look like they have wandered on set when delivering pizza and others deliver performances that would shame a porno movie.

The special effects are dire and are the worst kind of painted on CGI you can imagine. The ‘tsunami’, which is seen from the air, was just like a dark line being drawn on a map. You also get characters running from meteor showers that leave small puffs of smoke and nothing else. Their terror looks genuine however, but that’s probably just in anticipation of the reviews.

The religious angle is in your face from the start with people all discussing their faith from the get go. Our hero and his wife split when their daughter died and Ashley tearfully admits to not having been to church since that sad day. I say ‘sad’ but the actress displayed more of a ‘meh’ vibe. Anyway, one of the few highlights is when, after hiding in a church, she stops for a quick pray only to be struck by lightning - subtle stuff!

This is a total howler with a punch you in the face message and has no merit whatsoever. ‘Pray with me’ is the final line - pray you are never condemned to see this one!

The Tag Line : End of Days? End of Film Please. 12%

No. 135 : The Commuter (2018)

The Commuter at the IMDb

Liam Neeson takes time off from his busy schedule of looking for black people to beat up to make this routine, but decent thriller. If you have seen his ‘Die Hard on a plane’ thriller ’Non Stop’ you’ve pretty much seen this, as it is the same script with ‘plane’ cleverly changed to ‘train’.

Neeson plays the titular commuter and the opening credits show him making the same commute into New York through all weathers in a variety of jackets. Neeson does stretch himself with the part however, with his character being an Irish man who lives in America. He has range, you have to give him that.

He lives with his wife and teenage son and his quirk is that he reads old books to help his offspring with his schoolwork. This leads to him showing the odd bit of literary insight and something to talk about with fellow commuter, Mike out of ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s a shame Mike didn’t have a bigger part but seemingly he had a bus to catch.

The action all takes place over one day and on one train ride, so if you are looking for car chases and sex scenes this is not the film for you. Before he boards the fateful train we see Neeson sell insurance to a young couple and he reveals he lost everything in the credit crunch. He has only five years until retirement (must have had a tough paper round) and should have enough money to squeeze by if everything goes OK. Almost immediately he is pulled into the manager’s office and given the boot as he costs more than he brings in. Nice to see there’s none of that HR nonsense about giving people a warning and due process etc.

He heads to the pub where he meets former police partner Patrick Wilson and police chief Sam Neill. Wilson comes across nice and Neill a dick. Bet those positions are set in stone! After stiffing Wilson with the bar bill he heads home. Surely his day can’t get any worse? Of course it does, but first the lovely Vera Farmiga shows up and starts chatting to Neeson. He thinks she’s trying to chat him up but in reality she’s offering him $100k for finding a bag, as you do.

Cash strapped Neeson smells a rat but pockets the £25k deposit and starts looking for the elusive bag holder. We then get a long period were we meet the various commuters such as douche bag Wall Street broker Clem Fandango and a weasely ticket inspector who was at least a bit of fun.

Slowly the number of suspects reduces as Neeson gets involved in a few fist fights and rampant vandalism - it was just like the last train to Paisley Canal! As the train approaches its final destination, and with Neeson’s family held hostage, will he get the bag and free his loved ones? Will the rail company refund his ticket due to excessive delays and will the police’s geriatric recruitment programme save the day?

This was a decent effort in the ‘We’ve got a few stars with 10 minute gaps in their diaries - let’s churn out something quick’ genre. Neeson paints by numbers in his portrayal of a man let down by the system trying to save his family. At no point to you have any sympathy for his situation as you wait for the next choreographed punch up. You have more sympathy for the fellow commuters who have a beer soaked Irish man shouting ‘What’s in your bag’ at them with annoying regularity.

Farmiga has about five minutes on screen and Wilson and Neill much the same. The supporting cast do OK with thinly written parts and it was fun to see Clem Fandango say something other that ‘Steven, can you hear me?’

The overall premise was ridiculous. The hunted bag belonged to a witness and the baddies wanted it back before it was delivered to the cops. Fair enough, but with their resources and eyes on everything overview you’d have thought relying on a troubled commuter would be the worst plan possible. Clearly they weren’t shy about some blood letting so why not just blow up the train rather than hope that Neeson will deliver?

The film ramps up in the last 20 minutes with a pretty decent crash that many CGI pixels gave their lives for, followed by a siege that wasn’t as tense as the director was hoping for. There was a funny take on ‘I’m Spartacus’ and then an after the fact sequence where we catch up with Neeson which although somewhat pat, at least it gave us some closure.

If you went into town on a train to see ‘The Commuter’ at the cinema you would have regretted paying for the off peak travel but as a find on Amazon Prime it was a decent offering that stayed on the rails for the most part.

THE Tag Line : Worst Train Ride Since Jimmy Savile
Rating : 64%

No. 134 : The Magus (1968)

The Magus at the IMDb

Woody Allen is quoted as saying that if he had his life again he’d change nothing except that he wouldn’t watch ‘The Magus’ a second time. I can see where he’s coming from as it’s a frustrating and difficult film, but you will see worse and at least it’s always sunny!

Michael Caine stars in his seventh Definite Article outing at Nicholas Urfe (pronounced ‘earth’), a young teacher who is starting an assignment working at a remote Greek school. His predecessor killed himself and the conditions may have something to answer for - no OFSTED pass here! He’s told that 'there are no women here' to which he relies ’Good’. No, not like that - he’s nursing a broken heart!

We see in flashback his romance with a French air stewardess who shows him her prized glass paperweight with a flower inside - the self same one Caine receives as a gift in the post. He looks somewhat saddened - maybe he was expecting a consignment of nudie mags when the postman appeared?

Anyway, to wile away the time Caine wanders around the island and soon meets Anthony Quinn who is hamming it up as usual. His character is Conchis (pronounced ‘Conscious’) and he starts to entrance/annoy Caine with a series of mind games and parlour tricks. He reads Caine’s tarot cards and explains ‘The Magus’ (that’s the name of the film!) card represents the magician. He also goes into flashback mode to explain his own heartache and morphs into a young Trigger. Trigger is so young his broom is on its first head and second handle and he’s dodging the war draft and upsetting his lady love at the same time.

Meanwhile Cane is seeing a foxy Candice Bergen in 1920’s garb and lots of fantasy hallucinations. Quinn reveals he’s actually a shrink and Bergen is his nutty patient. Caine doesn’t know who to believe when Bergen says she’s sane and lets him have a big kiss. With his air hostess erstwhile girlfriend heading by for a layover and no teaching being done whatsoever, we have to wonder who is mad, who is sane and who will watch to the end to find out?

After an nice skinny dip with the air hostess Caine lets her go in preference to Bergen who may or may not be nutty. Quinn meanwhile gives up a bit of his backstory and a sorry episode involving his time as mayor during the Nazi occupation. Caine is indifferent but gets interested when the Nazis appear and start to bother him. Is the whole thing a film set? A hallucination? A pretentious journey into the troubled Caine’s mind? Don’t ask me, I just watched it!

There is so much happening in ‘The Magus’ that it’s hard to totally dismiss it. It is a disjointed mess but there are good bits, especially Quinn’s impossible dilemma when he has the choice of bashing three partisans to death or letting the Nazis kill 80 locals. Actually that one doesn’t seem too tough.

The film doesn’t have a coherent narrative and you get the sense that this was the plan throughout. You could imagine polo necked film students getting a lot from analysing every frame, but for a casual viewer seeking entertainment ‘The Magus’ can’t be recommended.

• Well, apart from the unreleased ‘The Debtors’ that’s the Caine Definite oeuvre covered. It’s been a mixed bag at best but from an enjoyability standpoint alone I’d rank them best to worst as Actors, Hand, Statement, Destructors, Swarm, Island, Magus.

25% TAG Line : Make it Disappear!

No.133 : The Statement (2003)

The Statement @ the IMDb

He makes a lot of Definite Article  movies does Michael Caine and we thank him for that. Still we’ve yet to see ‘The Magus’!

This one opens with some captions to set the scene - it’s 1944 and the Nazis are occupying France with the help of the Vichy government. We cut to some scenes shot in black and white, which is no doubt helpful to people who can’t distinguish between the past and the present day. Anyway a young Frenchmen is helping the Germans round up some Jews who are then shot. This young man sounds like Michael Caine which is helpful as he doesn’t look anything like him. I quite liked this technique - at least it was different to the usual fade into the older version of the character ploy.

We then move to colour as someone types out ‘The Statement’ - a document naming Caine’s character and the reasons why he has been executed by some Jewish revenge seekers. If you doubted their motivation they have went the extra mile by getting a large STATEMENT stamp made which is used to emboss the document in bright red ink. The trick is how to get the document onto Caine’s dead body as the old boy is still kicking - and kicking hard.

We first meet him at a pavement café enjoying a beer. His idyllic lifestyle is soon to hit a few bumps however, as a man with a photo of Caine is eyeing him up. Unfortunately he’s not an autograph hunter and soon gets bumped off by the septuagenarian swastika wearer in a scene that was surprising to the victim, but not to anyone who’d been paying the least amount of attention.

We then move to Paris were a new judge (Tilda Swinton) has been appointed to investigate crimes against humanity - and Caine is top of her list. Strange the French gave this high profile job to a 30 year old Scottish woman but at least she has Jeremy Northam (Cyber) to give her a hand, but little else. The two take an age to make much progress, hampered as they are by the machinations of the catholic church and a shady organisation run by Baron Munchausen.

After the best part of two hours they eventually get close to their quarry - will the STATEMENT be delivered and will those responsible for letting Caine roam free for 40 years be brought to account?

For a film you probably haven’t heard of ‘The Statement’ has a great cast with recognisable names well down the list. Folk like Colin Salmon and Frank Finlay show up for five minutes and are never seen again. I guess shooting in the south of France did appeal!

Caine, who looks like Edward Woodward in ‘Common as Muck’ throughout this film, is pretty good as the conflicted collaborator and murderer. He’s conflicted in the sense he’s a devout catholic but doesn’t mind killing folk and threatening his wife‘s (Charlotte Rampling)  dog (Benni). He clutches his religious medal and prays at the drop of a body but it was hard to take to him despite his nifty shooting and roof running skills. If you don’t like Caine’s character much you don’t get much from the ‘good guys’ with Tilda Swinton and Northam not exactly setting the screen alight. A lot of the film is taken up with arguing and looking through records, and they could have trimmed 20 minutes from the middle third no bother at all.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a decent effort with a couple of exciting scenes and workmanlike, if unspectacular, acting throughout.

Some of it was a bit far fetched though - the Catholic church covering up decades of misdeeds? Surely not!

THE Tag Line - Deserves a Caineing 58%

No. 132 : The Hand (1981)

The Hand @ the IMDb

 “What a pile of shit” Michael Caine declares midway through this schlock horror nightmare - whether he was talking about the production is unclear but such words would be a bit harsh. Just a bit though.

Caine plays Jon Lansdale a successful newspaper comic strip artist whose creation ‘Mandro’ pays for a nice life with an unfeasibly young, and new age wife. Lansdale is a bit of a dick from the off and enjoys yelling at his wife whilst she is driving him to the shops. This ends badly for him however as his drawing hand is lopped off by a passing truck as he tries to wave a car back. This scene was fantastically realised as the hand goes flying and Caine, covered in blood, starts screaming - possibly at his agent.

Time passes and soon the stumpefied Caine is getting fitted for a prosthetic that looks like it has been salvaged from a terminator. He suspects his wife is getting a bit too close to her yoga instructor and his agent is keen to let a young artist take over his strip. Caine meanwhile is having trouble adapting to his new single hand life and has flashbacks about the incident whilst pondering about the fate of his hand, that was never found.

With wife trouble escalating Caine heads off for a teaching job in California where he can talk to bored students and brood in his lonely log cabin. Things look up however when a young student shows up at his home and takes her clothes off - clearly a wavy hair / stump fetishist.

Despite trading the wife in for a younger and less annoying model Caine keeps spiraling further into madness and we wonder if the black and white flashbacks of the disembodied hand killing a tramp are for real or just his frenzied imagination at work.

With the wife ready to take their daughter away and his bit on the side having gone missing we have to guess if Caine is doing all the murders or is the disembodied hand really the culprit?

Despite my better judgement I enjoyed ‘The Hand’. It’s rubbish but it knows it’s rubbish and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Caine is manic throughout with his hairstyle getting ever madder as an insight to his mental state. The hand is well done and despite people clearly holding it on whilst it strangles them it’s a good laugh to see it scuttling about the place.

The film does stretch itself somewhat with a final wrong foot but as a study of madness and loss it is well done and it has a few unintended laughs peppered throughout, which adds to its appeal.

This was an early directorial outing for Oliver Stone before he got all political and for pure enjoyment purposes I’d put it up there with his best. Caine is of course working for the pay cheque but he gives it his all and is happy to go deep with the murder and sex scenes, despite the ridiculousness of each.

THE Tag Line : Give it a big hand! 68%

No. 131 : The Island (1980)

The Island at the IMDb

I’m in the middle of reading Michael Caine’s enjoyable autobiography ‘The Elephant to Hollywood’ and given the slagging he gave to ‘The Island’ I just had to move it up my viewing list.

Made in 1980 the film sits squarely in Caine’s wilderness years with rubbish like ‘The Swarm’ in the near past and ‘The Hand’ just up ahead - it’s almost like he had this blog in mind when making his flawed choices!

This effort sees him as an English journalist who bags an assignment to investigate the mysterious disappearance of dozens of ships in the Bahamas over the last few years. Over 2000 people have been lost but that doesn’t impress his editor who says the roads managed 50,000 in the same time. Not to be put off, Caine heads down to Florida with his annoying teenage son whom he buys a gun for, for no discernible reason, whilst on the way.

Caine hops on a cargo plane with the boy which manages to crash on a remote island - fair play to them, this sequence was pretty good but alas the budget when up in flames with the plane because it’s bargain basement from here on in.

Now stranded, Caine takes advice from a Hemmingway inspired old soak called Windsor played by the guy who was an old Alexei Sayle in an early season of ‘Stuff’. He’s really poor in this and you can only hope the drunk act was nothing of the kind. Anyway, Caine heads off on a boat towards the scene of many of the disappearances. He manages to finds a secret gang of pirates who have been pillaging the area for centuries in about five minutes, which does make you wonder what the authorities have been up to all this time.

The pirates have lived on ’The Island’ for 300 years and over time have developed their own dialect which sounds a lot like gibberish. Their leader is David Warner who takes a shine to Caine’s son. No, not like that. The boy is easily led and is soon giving his Dad no end of grief. Caine meanwhile busies himself with trying to escape and getting into the affections of a native lady. Can he get away and rescue his son? Will the pirates be exposed for the bunch of middle class English actors they are? Or will Caine’s sharp shooter son put his Dad out of his misery and save us all from Water ?

This was a fun romp despite being totally rubbish. It was written by Jaws scribe Peter Benchley but lacking the focus of a big shark, it meanders about as they try to find ways to advance the plot.

The pirates who include Bullman and Tinker off Lovejoy have no menace whatsoever and despite a few bloodthirsty murders they all look like they have just been pulled off the beach. Their motivations are weak given they look to avoid civilization yet regularly go on plundering sprees for NYC t-shirts and hi-fi equipment.

Caine is terrible as journalist and hapless Dad Blair Maynyard but he does have our sympathies as he’s dealing with a ridiculous script and some cringe worthy dialogue. At one point he utters ‘They’re a bunch of arseholes playing at Long John Silver’. Couldn’t have put it better myself!

THE Tag Line - Pirates of the has a beens 27%

No. 130 : The Actors (2003)

The Actors @ The IMDb

 The Michael Caine-a-thon reaches film 19 out of a potential 111 with ‘The Actors’, which I saw on general release in 2003 and awarded an IMDb score of 7 - but can remember nothing of it. That’s not to dismiss it out of hand as it is good fun, but I doubt I’ll have retained much of it when I inevitably come to watch it again in 15 years time.

Caine plays Anthony O’Malley, a washed up actor who is starring in a risible theatre production of Richard the Third set in Nazi Germany.  The cast includes Bernard Black himself, Dylan Moran, who is an awful actor but is kept on as he helps Caine with his hump. Both are at a low ebb after Moran fails a sausage commercial audition and Caine realises he’ll never get out of debt or low rent roles unless something changes.

Opportunity knocks when Caine, who is researching a role in a gangster’s bar, hears of an unclaimed debt for which the two parties involved have never met. This seems a bit convenient but it gives them the chance to hatch a scheme where their acting skills can be employed to collect the debt and split the cash.

The gangster, Barreller, played by Michael Gambon seems a tough prospect at first but Moran soon softens to him especially when he meets his daughter, Cersei Lannister. The Actors manage to get the cash but soon have to resort to ever more elaborate schemes to keep the real villains from taking back their money and exacting some deserved revenge.

‘The Actors’ is a pretty good distraction for 90 minutes. It’s no masterpiece but there are plenty of laughs throughout with the two leads quite happy to take the piss out of their profession and the luvvies who inhabit it. Caine especially does well as the old ham O’Malley. His language is choice throughout and he shows real dedication by appearing in drag at the end - how the baddies were ever convinced he was a woman is another matter.

The film has a five acts narrative device with a cute nine year old girl giving the narration and the guys some pointers. This was a bit cutesy pie for me and didn’t sit well in a script where every other word was an expletive. The pace did bounce along well though, and it was only towards the end that things started to get a bit muddled and contrived.

The two leads were good value but Michael Gambon seemed a bit muted in the potentially fun role of Barreller. He didn’t have too much to do though, conceding much of the ground to Lena Headey as his daughter who had to do her best with a thin romance with Moran.

It was good to see a lot of familiar faces bobbing about such as the sarcastic priest off ‘Father Ted’. He’s a really good actor!

All in all this was a fun film that didn’t take itself too seriously and neither should you. A suspension of disbelief is required as there are a lot of unlikely events, but it’s worth your time for Caine and Moran cursing a blue streak in some elaborate make up if nothing else.

THE Tag Line : Luvvie It 70%