Michael Caine

  • Harry Brown (2009)

    Harry Brown (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) The best reason to see this art-house exploitation film is to watch Michael Caine, visibly showing his age, reprising some of his stone-cold killer mannerism.  There isn’t anything more about this film, after all, than a revenge fantasy featuring a freshly-widowed pensioner taking revenge on a bunch of teenage hoodlums.  Starting from a paranoid view of the world, Harry Brown doesn’t spare a tut-tut while describing the depravity of today’s youth.  It does get quite a bit more enthusiastic, however, in showing its protagonist use his old Marine training to take down the worst of the local teens.  Caine with a gun is always fun to watch, even though the movie around him remains an uneasy blend of art-house drama and genre shoot’em-up.  The flaccid pacing, sure-footed cinematography and attention paid to Caine’s center-stage performance are more in-line with Oscar-baiting movies than the sudden bloody violence, squalid setting and unintelligibly profane characters.  Like many modern vigilante-justice films, Harry Brown remains stuck between condemning violence and indulging into the sheer thrill of it: Different kinds of viewers will have different ideas as to what are the film’s best sequences.  While the result doesn’t escape a few flaws (including a finale that seems to reach for unnecessary connections between characters), it’s a watchable film that is perhaps most interesting in comparison with other vigilante films, other British crime dramas and other Michael Caine tough guys.

  • Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

    Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, July 2002) As a big fan of the original film’s low-budget spy parody, I was let down by the scatological humor of the sequel and this impression only worsens with this third entry. The jokes become increasingly self-referential, up to a point where there isn’t much here that doesn’t refer to the Austin Powers mythology itself. Spy parody? Forget it! It doesn’t help that the “writer” is working with a palette of roughly five jokes, which are repeated time and time again way beyond the point of diminishing results. What’s worth saving are the first five minutes, which feature a series of celebrity cameos and a high-energy opening sequence. The rest goes downhill fast, even though I think this film is better than the second one if only because the gross-out humor is toned down in comparison. The only latter flashes of humor, though, are a G*dz*ll* reference and a gag on reading white subtitles on white background. (Alas, as with all the other jokes, this last joke is stretched for about a minute more than it ought to be.) On the other hand, it’s still good to see the familiar gang of Powers characters come back. Among the new character, though it’s mixed bag: Michael Caine is particularly good as Nigel Powers. Beyonce Knowles is positively adorable in one scene (in Power’s pad) and simply wasted in the rest of the film; she deserves better material. As for the title character, Goldmember is one of the lamest thing about the film, a character who doesn’t elicit one single laugh. The rest of the film plays as a parade of wasted opportunities; why don’t you go see Undercover Brother for a film that not only does disco-blacksploitation right, but is also considerably funnier to boot?