Quicksand (2003)

When writing these movie blog posts, I sometimes have to take a stab in the dark at a movie's year of release until I have a chance to look it up later and after finishing "Quicksand" - a title that lured me in with the promise of Hitchcockian thrills and a synopsis that did the same (a guy falsely accused of murder goes on the run in Monte Carlo) - I took a punt that it was from 1983 and still find it hard to believe what I watched - straight-to-video nonsense with 80s tv-series production values, ludicrous plotting, and surely Michael Keaton and Michael Caine's career-worst performances - was actually released twenty years later than I'd assumed, in 2003.

★★☆☆☆

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A Shock To The System (1990)

A very minor thriller and yet an exceedingly enjoyable one thanks to the star-power of the two leads (Caine and McGovern), this 1990 release adapted from a Simon Brett book has Caine playing an upper manager almost on the way out -  old and overlooked for a plum promotion - when he discovers a new magic way to reinvigorate his work and private life: murder dressed up as accidents.

★★★☆☆

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The Quiet American (2002)

The Quiet American

"They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived," says the central character of Graham Greene's book, played here by Michael Caine, Thomas Fowler, an English reporter in Vietnam whom it is very hard not to think of as Graham Greene himself because like Fowler, Graham Greene sat at The Continental Hotel in Saigon overlooking Lam Son Square writing articles for The Times about the breakdown of French colonialism in the north of Vietnam, and the fact this adaptation, one more loyal to the book's political angle than the 1959 original adaptation, is able to seamlessly blend Greene's fiction (a love story and political thriller) into actual world history shows just how acute an eye for human nature and world politics Greene developed as he lived his Vietnam experience.

★★★★☆

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Harry Brown (2009)

When housing estate thugs murder his friend, former marine Harry Brown (played by Michael Caine), an elderly gent grown weary of the gangbangers' reign of terror and frustrated by the ineffectual response of police, takes the law into his own hands and his campaign of retribution makes this a captivating revenge thriller, like Get Carter on a pension, with harrowing scenes of drug den depravity and wanton youth violence helping to keep audiences angry and sympathetic to Harry Brown's vigilantism.

★★★☆☆

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Now You See Me 2 (2016)

That huge ensemble of characters from number one, all deeply earnest about their craft - magic - which unites them in a fraternity as boysy, ridiculous and self-important as the Illuminati, reunites for this preposterous sequel that pits the Four Horsemen in a magic war with a tech wizard, except this is cinema magic, not magic magic, so there is no 'reveal' to justify the movie's long tangled string of events and you can't possibly care about what happens given the "anything goes" nature of the plot and the fact it all goes on in a one-note bombastic patter and that everything, even years in jail, might simply, quite ridiculously, be part of the slow burn.

★★☆☆☆

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Without A Clue (1988)

Full of laughs but light on mystery, this comedy posits that Ben Kingsley's Dr Watson is the real great detective of 221B Baker Street - he merely attributes his genius for solving mysteries to the mythologised Sherlock Holmes of his stories - while his colleague who presents himself as Sherlock Holmes to the adoring London public is an out-of-his-depth, drunken, womanising dolt played by Michael Caine. 

★★★☆☆

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Dressed To Kill (1980)

Modern audiences won't be surprised by the twist in this 1980 Brian De Palma thriller about a high-class prostitute on the trail of a killer, but it is interesting to watch for the director's nods to Hitchcock, specifically Psycho, including an extended sequence in which poor short-term lead actress, Angie Dickinson, meets a kind of Psycho shower scene demise, her death being the last of a long string of insults to befall her including her repeatedly losing her gloves, misplacing her diamond ring, falling into a sexual liaison in the back of a taxi, becoming exposed to venereal disease, and being stuck in an elevator going down, not up, with a starey, obnoxious girl - you can imagine Dickinson thinking, "Just kill me already."

★★★★☆

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

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Now You See Me (2013)

David Copperfield-esque magicians perform an Oceans Eleven style grift and arouse the interest of police and from there, over a series of subsequent grifts, this entertaining romp escalates the stakes to preposterous levels, particularly when real danger arrives in the form of car chases and carelessly fired guns, surely not in balance with the magicians' endgame, you'll think, even before you know what that is...

★★★☆☆

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Deathtrap (1982)

This is another Michael Caine film that has been adapted from a suspense mystery play (this one by Ira Levin) and like his two Sleuth films, this one too involves a sinister cat-and-mouse parlour game (check) played out in a theatrically claustrophobic set (check) between a pair of feuding male protagonists (check), one of whom is a successful mystery writer (check), and like Sleuth it is great twisty-turny fun.

★★★★☆

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Sleuth (2007)

An awful remake of the 1972 movie based on the Anthony Shaffer play, in which everything about the now classic original film has been changed for the worse, including the role played by Michael Caine (now the older of the two protagonists), the set (modern and ridiculous), and many elements of the original story, presumably to mark this as different to the original masterpiece and give the false impression there was a need to remake it.

★☆☆☆☆

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Sleuth (1972)

Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier star in this film adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's delightfully sinister mystery stage play set in a remote Wiltshire mansion, about two men - a famous mystery writer and a hairdresser - facing off in a battle of wits that grows ever more deadly.

★★★★★

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