Movie Mahal

* * * *

Director Jan Egleson must have been taking careful notes when he was watching Get Carter because this is a work that is constructed deliciously around the cold dead eyes of Michael Caine which pierces through every frame. Egleson glances into the cutthroat mischief of the corporate world in which the suits self-deprecate at any opportunity while sharpening their knives and waiting to pounce for the jugular. Caine as Graham Marshall isn’t one of them but when he is passed over for a major promotion, he gets a taste for the homicidal annihilation of the competition, and literally kneecaps anyone who gets in his way including his self-obsessed wife. As a political satire, what makes this so hilarious is not only the brilliantly morbid voice over but the wickedness of Caine’s charismatically Machiavellian performance, one of his most underseen turns in the American films he made.