The “big mistake” Michael Caine always regretted making: “We got slaughtered”
Considering how many great movies Michael Caine has under his belt, he hasn’t half made some bad decisions in his time. From the disaster that was Jaws: The Revenge to Twist and a bizarre modern-day version of Oliver Twist in which he played Fagin, Caine has sometimes lent himself to some cinematic atrocities.
At least he’s aware, though. Caine has often admitted to taking on roles for the sake of a job (and a cheque), but he has balanced his career with enough impressive hits to make these questionable roles slightly more forgivable. Only slightly.
Caine hasn’t always taken the blame for his bad movies, like when he hit back at criticisms hurled towards him for Jaws: The Revenge. “I did 20 minutes in it. I didn’t even get lead credit in it. Go to the people who played the lead, you know what I’m saying?” he told Movieline. I guess he has a point.
However, when it comes to a certain movie he did in the 2000s, he could admit to a specific “big mistake.” The actor was cast in Sleuth, a supposed remake of the 1972 film of the same name in which he appeared alongside Laurence Olivier. This time around, though, Caine played the part that Olivier played in the original, while Jude Law was cast in his role from the ‘70s version.
The original version was directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz and received praise from critics, but the same can’t be said about Kenneth Branagh’s interpretation. It was pretty much widely panned, although Caine thinks it’s because it was marketed totally wrong, and he can admit that a mistake was made when it came to naming the film.
“I mean, it was a misnomer, I think, to call it a remake. We called it Sleuth and the remake of Sleuth, but Harold Pinter wrote it and there wasn’t a single line from the original story in it,” Caine told NPR.
“I mean, we should’ve called it something else,” he added. “I think we made a big mistake there because we got slaughtered in the reviews because they said this isn’t a bit like the other one. And, of course, it wasn’t because it was an entirely different piece of writing by an equally brilliant writer, but an entirely different one. So, we made a big mistake there”.
Inspired by the play of the same name by Anthony Shaffer, Pinter’s version wildly differed, although the characters still had the same names. The main difference comes with the decades of technological advancements between the movies, with the 2007 film featuring a much more modern approach to the game-playing and paranoia. It was a darker interpretation of the story, but critics just weren’t convinced.
Poor Jude Law faced his second big failure playing a character previously portrayed by Caine (the first being Alfie, which he’d starred in a few years earlier). Sleuth was a write-off, and it’s one of the few films that Caine can admit was a bit of a mistake.
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