The Holcroft Covenant Reviews

Caine is ok in this light thriller on ominous subject (nazi lagacy) in wich Frankenheimer is really down.

Oh boy, where to begin? One of the few films that Caine barely mentioned in either of his two autobiographies, simply describing it as "yet another bad film". Well, it certainly wasn't a successful film. But bad? Yes and no. Based on the novel by Robert Ludlum, The Holcroft Covenant is a film of two halves. The first, for the most part, is pretty good. The plot is set up after a meeting between Caine’s English-born New Yorker and Michael Lonsdale. Caine’s remorseful Nazi father along with two others left behind a sum of 4 billion dollars to use as reparations and supposedly ‘undo’ the atrocities committed by Hitler during World War II. What follows is decent espionage action, with daylight assassination attempts, murder and an appearance by Shane Rimmer as Caine goes on the run to find the other Nazi’s offspring in order to sign the covenant. The well paced first half is followed by a bizarre second half that includes such ‘highlights’ as a fat, topless, German burlesque ‘act' (that really put me off the smoky bacon crisps I was eating at the time), a horrible screechy score, Nazi incest, a laughable murder and an odd ‘dream that is not a dream’ sequence that is shortly and randomly followed by Victoria Tennant wanting to get into Caine’s pants, out of the blue. Yeah. The climax and big reveal is quite good though. (That’s the ending of the film, not the sex scene by the way). Caine’s excellent as always. But it’s still a very weird film, made all the worse by the crappy VHS print that’s on the DVD, full of ghosting. Yeah, just weird. There's some good dialogue in places though. Mario Adorf is pretty cool too.



1/5