The terrible movie Michael Caine hates talking about: “What the fuck are you asking me about it for?”
Making bad movies is something every actor has been guilty of because no matter how confident a performer is on the first day of shooting, there are no guarantees the end product will live up to expectations. Of course, stars also make terrible films because they need the money, and Michael Caine has no problem holding his hands up and calling himself guilty on both fronts.
Clearly, it didn’t have an adverse effect in the long run when Caine retired at the age of 90 following a 70-year career that won him two Academy Awards, cemented him as one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever British exports, and saw him leave behind a legacy of legendary characters, iconic roles, and unforgettable performances.
He’d be the first one to admit he appeared in his fair share of shite, though, and that openness and honesty have always been one of Caine’s most endearing traits. Whether he was phoning it in as the villain in a Steven Seagal flick, getting crapped on by hundreds of bees, or slumming it in the shoddy sequel to a classic disaster epic, the veteran never shied away from the lowest points of his professional life.
By default, the most famous bad movie Caine ever made was Jaws: The Revenge, thanks entirely to one legendary quote. Everybody with even a passing knowledge of the actor’s career knows fine well that he missed collecting his first Oscar in person because of the awful sequel, but he didn’t mind too much when it paid him a lot of money, and he didn’t even bother his arse to watch it.
Still, he doesn’t care for being singled out for scorn for agreeing to play the character of Hoagie in the first place. Sure, Joseph Sargent’s aquatic creature feature was irredeemably atrocious, bombed at the box office, and was immediately cited as one of the worst movies ever made, but one thing nobody should do is lay that blame entirely at the door of the guy billed fourth in the ensemble.
“Say we take Batman Begins, and I say to you, ‘That was a fantastically successful film, wasn’t it?'” he analogised to Movieline. “And you say, ‘Yeah, it was. It got good reviews and made a fortune’. And I say, ‘You know why? Because I was the butler in it’. And you’d say, ‘What a conceited bastard. Who does he think he is? He was on the screen 20 minutes out of two hours. How dare he say that!”
It’s an excellent point and one he used to voice his ongoing frustrations. “Twist that around; you’ve got exactly the same thing with Jaws: The Revenge,” he continued. “What the fuck are you asking me about it for? 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? I played small parts in Battle of Britain. I was in A Bridge Too Far. I didn’t take any credit for their success. Why should I take the blame for a failure?”
He’s not wrong: Caine was a supporting character in Jaws: The Revenge, and as the most famous member of the cast by far, he’s been the one shouldering the blame for how bad it turned out when, at the end of the day, he was only there to pick up his paycheque.
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