The Michael Caine movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Stupid and incompetent”
Sometimes, you have to take on a bad job because, at the end of the day, it’ll pay the bills – or, in Michael Caine’s case, a nice new house. The actor, who rose to prominence as a star of classic British movies like Alfie, The Ipcress Files, The Italian Job, and Get Carter, is a stalwart figure in the industry, but that doesn’t mean he has starred in a few terrible movies.
Despite the countless highly-acclaimed movies he has appeared in – you can also add Sleuth, Educating Rita, Hannah and her Sisters, The Cider House Rules, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Man Who Would Be King, and many more to that list – he has picked some questionable roles. One of these poor choices came from a place of genuine interest in the script he was presented with, and you can hardly blame Caine for taking on the role – he didn’t know the film would turn out a disaster.
Of course, we could only be talking about Jaws: The Revenge, the 1987 movie that stood as the fourth sequel to Steven Spielberg’s classic horror movie. Caine was a huge fan of the original film, so he jumped at the chance to work on a movie that would be part of the franchise, but Spielberg’s lack of involvement perhaps should’ve been his first indication of impending cinematic doom.
When the movie was released, it was widely panned, and Roger Ebert had many negative things to say about the Joseph Sargeant-directed film. His review began with a scathing opening paragraph: “Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one – a ripoff. And that’s a surprise, because the film is the fourth in a series that has served Universal Pictures long and well, and it stars Lorraine Gary, the wife of the studio’s chief executive officer. Wasn’t there someone in charge of assuring that the film was at least a passable thriller, however bad? I guess not.”
Criticising the movie’s lazy and uninspired plot, Ebert wrote, “The screenplay is simply a series of meaningless episodes of human behaviour, punctuated by shark attacks.” The film earned seven Golden Raspberry nominations, winning one for ‘Worst Visual Effects’, unsurprisingly.
Ebert continued: “There is one other thing I can’t believe about Jaws the Revenge, and that is that on March 30, Michael Caine passed up his chance to accept his Academy Award in person because of his commitment to this movie. Maybe he was thinking the same thing as the marine biologist in the movie: that if you don’t go right back in the water after something terrible happens to you, you might be too afraid to ever go back in again.”
Indeed, Caine decided not to appear in Los Angeles to take home his award for Hannah and her Sisters, but he was hardly that bothered. Writing in his book Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over My Guide to Life, the actor, who hasn’t even seen the film, explained, “When people say to me, ‘That was the worst film I’ve ever seen!’ I’d say, ‘Probably, but it paid for a beautiful house for my mother, so what’s your problem?”
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