The Michael Caine Blogathon – The Fourth Protocol (1987)

This is my 2nd of 3 reviews for the The Marvelous Michael Caine Blogathon 2018 being hosted by Gill of WeegieMidget.

Tnx for letting me partake Gill!

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“You’ve betrayed your country. You’ve passed on untold numbers of military secrets to Moscow, and endangered the lives of British men and women. And I’d say you’ve weakened NATO. Perhaps irretrievably” – Sir Nigel Irvine

Number of Times Seen – 1 (12 Mar 2018)

Brief Synopsis – A British agent is tasked with finding a Russian sleeper agent before he manages to detonate a nuclear bomb in order to reignite the Cold War.

My Take on it – I have always enjoyed a good spy thriller and was hoping to get one with this film.

Unfortunately, it just moves too slowly and at no point does it get momentum to break free from a monotonous storyline.

The story itself jumps around too much with either little to no explanation or explanations that are too technical or trivial to comprehend what they want us to know.

The cast is fine, but with actors like Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan, it is expected that the pacing of this would be more thrilling and action packed than it really is.

I have never read the book that this is based on and I wonder if in print things are more exciting and interesting than this script manages to deliver.

Bottom Line – Too slow moving spy thriller that loses its punch due to poor pacing. The story jumps around too much and even gets too technical when it should be much more thrilling and action packed.  Caine and Brosnan are both fine here, but much more is expected from them and the script just fails to deliver.  I wonder if the book is able to keep things more interesting as things move along.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – Sir Michael Caine once said of this film in his autobiography “What’s It All About?” (1992): “We wound up with a wordy action movie which, although it was quite a good picture, and did fair business, never had the speed and pace of the best American action movies. So for long sequences in the film, we not only had a talking picture, but a lot of talk, and even worse, most of it unintelligible. I went there as the star and Associate Producer, and one might have thought this would give me sufficient authority to put my own strongly-held opinions into practice, but no chance. Even I, in my exalted position, wound up making a talking picture, when it should have been a moving one.” (From IMDB)

Rating – BAFTA Worthy (6/10)

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