“Stinkers creep up on you”: The 1990 movie Michael Caine knew nobody would like
It’s a given that not every movie made is going to be a hit, but of course, an actor rarely goes into a project with the expectation that they’re about to be the star of a pile of cinematic shit, although for Michael Caine, sometimes he is aware, and he goes along for the ride anyway.
For example, there is no way he didn’t know that the sequel Jaws: The Revenge was going to be an utter disaster, although that didn’t stop him from appearing in it. The Razzie-nominated movie was awful, and Caine once admitted, “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts, it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific”.
What about the terrible disaster movie The Swarm from 1978 or 2021’s Twist, a modern-day retelling of Oliver! that was worse than you could possibly imagine? Caine clearly goes into certain projects with a level of understanding in regards to its potential success rate, because he has appeared in enough great films to provide evidence of his awareness of genuinely good cinema. He’s not a total fool.
In some cases, though, he really does have his own best interests at heart, but it just doesn’t work out. Take Bullseye! for example, the 1990 film that Caine genuinely didn’t expect to be a flop, only to be met with an embarrassing box office reception that hardly scraped £100,000.
In 1998, Caine revealed during an interview at NFT that “Stinkers creep up on you. You’re sort of doing it, and it’s going along, it’s going along, and then one day you go, ‘Oh God! What am I doing here?’” That’s how he felt when he began the process of filming Bullseye!, which also featured James Bond star Roger Moore and Sally Kirkland, who’d not long earned an Academy Award nomination for Anna.
Helmed by Death Wish director Michael Winner, the action comedy saw Caine and Moore play a pair of conmen who resemble two nuclear physicists whom they also portray in dual roles. It’s an unbelievable premise that asks the audience to stretch their imaginations and suspend their disbelief, but it just falls flat as a game of deception and mixed identities, where the script, which is credited to five writers, doesn’t have the gravitas to pull off such a far-fetched idea.
When Caine realised he was far from making a masterpiece, he knew that he had to just do the best he could so as not to embarrass himself too much.
“And you think, ‘I better make the best of it. I know what I’ll do, this is the review I’ll get for this: the picture stank but as usual Caine gave a good performance’,” he added.
Unfortunately, the reviews were not as nice as Caine had hoped, and the movie has gone down as one of the more forgettable numbers in his career. You can’t get it right every time, but Caine was surely annoyed to walk away from this film without even a decent cheque to show for it, as he did with Jaws: The Revenge.
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