The movies Michael Caine doesn’t mind being called “a piece of crap”
There’s very little actors can do about having their credits repurposed and remade when the industry decides it’s time for a fresh coat of paint, but Michael Caine decided to take a different approach by appearing in some of them himself.
The legendary star lent his name to a string of phenomenal features during his initial ascent up the industry ladder, ranging from The Ipcress File, Gambit, and Get Carter to The Italian Job, Alfie, and Sleuth. Every single one of those aforementioned titles has been reinvented on either the big or small screen, and none of them have been anywhere near as good as the original.
Joe Cole donned the glasses of Harry Palmer for a limited series overhauling the 1960s espionage favourite, Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz’s do-over of Gambit was declared dead on arrival, Mark Wahlberg’s The Italian Job was the definition of a solid-if-unspectacular Hollywood caper, Sylvester Stallone’s Get Carter was an abomination, and the failure of Alfie V2.0 didn’t dissuade Jude Law from trying again with Sleuth and experiencing similar results.
He was the face of the original, but Caine nonetheless decided that showing up in Get Carter as Cliff Brumby and lending support as Andrew Wyke in Sleuth was worth his time. On every single occasion, the follow-up couldn’t hold a candle to the film that came before, which led the two-time Academy Award winner to reflect on the best way to go about mounting a remake.
“My view is that you should always do remakes of failures,” he told The Independent. “Then you’ve got nowhere to go but up, you know?” Unfortunately, the film business didn’t listen when it was time to go combing through the Caine back catalogue for inspiration, and each of them fell victim to the very same sentiment the star espoused.
“They can’t say, ‘Well, it’s not as good as the original, you made a piece of crap,'” he offered. “They’d just say, ‘What a piece of crap that was’, anyway.” Sadly, nobody seemed to listen, although the production line of remakes based on Caine’s classics has thankfully dried up in recent years.
That was the thinking behind Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, too, with the actor believing he and Steve Martin could do a much better job than Marlon Brando and David Niven managed in Bedtime Story. Based on his own assessment, the next time an eager producer of executive goes digging through Caine’s filmography for the next potential hit, the best place to start would be the bottom of the barrel.
Not that anyone’s desperately crying out for The Swarm to get a new telling, but by the logic of the star who was literally crapped on by bees the first time around, there’s very little chance it could be any worse.