“It was too small for its own good”: Michael Caine names his most overlooked movie
With a career spanning more than 70 years that was packed full of stone-cold classics, cult favourites, box office blockbusters, and the occasional disaster, it takes a truly dedicated fan of Michael Caine to be eminently familiar with every single entry in his storied filmography.
There are well over 100 of them, and while everybody knows the likes of The Ipcress File, Zulu, Get Carter, The Italian Job, Alfie, and many more, the actor would be the first to admit that he made plenty of forgettable features during the several downturns he experienced during his career.
Of course, he was too good to be consigned to irrelevancy. Caine overcame being written off more than once to settle comfortably into his groove as a legendary character actor, and he occupied that position for the final two decades of his professional life before calling it quits after the release of 2023’s The Great Escaper.
On a personal level, the most difficult period he had to endure unfolded between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Choice roles became so few and far between that Caine contemplated retirement in favour of continuing his sideline as a restauranteur. Thankfully, a timely intervention from Jack Nicholson stopped it from happening and gave rise to a sensational second wind.
That was the time when Caine found himself slumming it in awful Steven Seagal flicks and made-for-TV sequels he was starring in solely for the money, so it would make sense that those wilderness years gave rise to a film the man himself lamented as the most overlooked he’d ever made.
Jan Egleson’s black comedy A Shock to the System was released in January 1990 and promptly bombed after barely recouping a third of its budget at the box office. That wasn’t a reflection on his performance, with Caine excellent as an advertising executive pushed out of power by the next generation, who then becomes inspired to seek revenge on everyone who’s ever wronged him after he kills a homeless man and gets away scot-free.
It’s a deliciously dark and subversive tale about ego, vanity, and accountability, leaving Caine crushingly disappointed that nowhere near enough people saw it. “That was a lovely little film, but it was too small for its own good, really,” he told Alex Simon. “It got lost. It was the sort of film, were it made today, would be great as a film for HBO or something. But at the time, it just got lost in the system, no pun intended.”
Caine’s star power was firmly on the wane by the turn of the ’90s, and audiences simply weren’t interested in showing up in their numbers to catch his latest outing, no matter how well-received his work was. That doesn’t obscure the fact that A Shock to the System is inarguably one of his most underrated efforts, something the two-time Academy Award winner wholeheartedly agrees with.
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