More recently I realized that I should probably not skip it, since it appears to be Caine's last film.
News broke last year? was it? that Caine, now 91, intended to stop acting in films and formally retire. It was a sad but inevitable day. He doesn't want to have to be wheeled on set to stumble through lines he can't remember. Caine is the kind of dignified performer who deserves to go out with as many of his lifelong skills intact as possible.
My next thought, though, was that from the title alone, it reminded me of another retirement film from one of his peers, which was Robert Redford's The Old Man & the Gun from 2018, a little side diversion for the otherwise visionary David Lowery.
Sure enough, I checked the plot synopsis of The Great Escaper and it has to do with an 89-year-old World War II vet who "broke out" of his retirement home in order to attend a 2014 70th anniversary remembrance of D-Day. It's based on a true story.
What is it with screen legends who want to sign off on their careers with prison break movies?
The Old Man & the Gun, you will recall, featured Redford as a character who held up banks with three other geriatrics who were slightly younger than him. This was also based on a real person, and that real person would routinely get caught and then break out of prison. I'm not looking up the details now, but I think he escaped prison something like 30 times, which just sounds made up. At what point do they just throw away the key?
Redford chose this as his "last" project -- more on that in a moment -- and now Caine has done the same. And in this case the title has additional metaphorical significance, as Caine is also "escaping" the career that probably did not feel very much like a prison to him, although who knows.
The thing is, I just checked on IMDB to see if Redford was as good as his word, and of course he has not been. I say "of course" maybe because Redford is still only 87 now, and probably realized he was still capable of working if he wanted to work, and he obviously did. Perhaps he was contractually obliged to reprise his MCU role in Avengers: Endgame, though they certainly could have worked around that -- maybe he was only in the big final funeral scene, I don't really remember. That doesn't explain his vocal work in the 2020 film Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia (huh? what the hell is that?), though at least he didn't appear on screen, and maybe the movie sat on the shelf for a couple years.
I'll miss Caine, but these guys should never say never. Maybe that's why Clint Eastwood, now 93 with his film Juror #2 in post-production, never does.
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