We get two Michael Caines for the price of one in 1990’s comedy, Bullseye! – plus two Roger Moores to boot. Any good? Well, it’s a Michael Winner film, so… The 1990s were Caine’s last decade as a consistent leading man before he moved more permanently into supporting actor elder statesman territory. This decade features ... The 1990s films of Michael Caine: Bullseye! (1990)
We get two Michael Caines for the price of one in 1990’s comedy, Bullseye! – plus two Roger Moores to boot. Any good? Well, it’s a Michael Winner film, so…
The 1990s were Caine’s last decade as a consistent leading man before he moved more permanently into supporting actor elder statesman territory. This decade features some of his most forgotten work, but it also contains one of his most beloved and enduring roles as Scrooge in Muppets Christmas Carol, his second Best Supporting Actor Academy Award win for The Cider House Rules, a return to his iconic spy character Harry Palmer for two TV movies, the villain role opposite Steven Seagal in Seagal’s directorial debut and the role he was born to play, yes, Joseph Stalin. Join me as I delve into Caine’s 1990s to see what gems I can unearth and what’s perhaps best left hidden.
NB: Spoilers for Bullseye! lay ahead.
Directed by: Michael Winner (The Mechanic, Death Wish, Death Wish II, Death Wish III, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood, Appointment With Death)
Tagline(s): On Target… And Totally Off the Wall!
They Were the World’s Greatest Conmen… Almost.
Other Featured Geezers: Roger Moore as Gerald Bradley-Smith/Sir John Bavistock, Sally Kirkland as Willie, Deborah Barrymore as Flo Fleming, Lee Patterson as Darrell Hyde, Nicholas Courtney as Sir Hugh and John Cleese as Man on the Beach in Barbados Who Looks Like John Cleese.
What’s it all about, Alfie?: Dodgy government scientist Dr Daniel Hicklar (Michael Caine) has invented a new source of cheap clean energy and, along with his equally dodgy partner Sir John Bavistock (Roger Moore), is planning on secretly selling the formula on the open market to unscrupulous foreign powers.
Meanwhile cockney conman Sidney Lipton (also Michael Caine but with a fake nose) is fresh out of prison and roped into a scheme by his old flatmate/flame Willie (Sally Kirkland), alongside the partner who sold him out, Gerald Bradley-Smith (also Roger Moore but with a moustache and grey hair). Using Sidney’s and Gerald’s uncanny likenesses to the two crooked scientists, they’ll pilfer their diamond filled safety deposit boxes.
However, they instead become unwittingly embroiled in a more dangerous plot, orchestrated by the UK and US governments, in which they must continue impersonating the scientists and go through with the sale of fake energy plans.
Off the two set on the “Orient Express Autumn Tour of Stately Homes of England and Scotland” with the real Hicklar and Bavistock hot on their tails.
Mistaken identities, fart jokes, a bike chase, and many dubious Roger Moore innuendos ensue!
Caine-ness: Michael B Jordan recently won an Academy Award for playing twins in Sinners, whereas Caine’s hard work here playing doppelgangers was unfairly snubbed by all major award bodies. There’s no accounting for taste.
This film opens with Caine’s voiceover helpfully outlining the plot for the slower members of the audience (which for a Michael Winner movie, is the bulk of them), using his signature accent but with the cockney twang ramped way up; “They say that everybody in the world has someone, somewhere, who looks like they do. It was my bad luck that the man who looked like me was an American scientist working on some scheme to produce cheap electricity by a thing called fusion, his name was Doctor Daniel Hicklar. He was an idiot.”
We then see Hicklar in his lab and are treated to Caine’s unconventional attempt at an “American accent”. Caine, not best known for his dialect skills, is certainly doing some sort of accent here, one which traverses continents within the span of a sentence. Whether any actual American has ever sounded like this I can’t confirm.
Caine has played an American before, and would again, with those results being somewhat more successful. His shoddy accent here is likely a joke, since it’s commented on by characters within the film – such as when cockney Sidney, who is pretending to be Hicklar, bumps into a fellow ex-con who tells him, “Love the new nose Sid, the accent stinks.”.
Then Willie bumps into the real Hicklar, but thinking it’s Sidney says, “get that accent right”, as does Gerald when he tells him, “keep practicing the accent, Sidney”.
It’s not long before we’re properly introduced to Caine’s other character, the one who has been narrating, Sidney Lipton.
“I was a few miles away, detained as a guest of her majesty. That means I was in prison,” he says, pointing out the bleeding obvious, since we are looking at what is clearly a prison as he says this.
We then see Sidney inside playing darts (and Caine wearing a big false nose) and getting a bullseye, so you can’t say the film doesn’t deliver on its title. He also uses these same dart skills to vanquish the evil doppelgangers at the end, so it’s a Chekov’s bullseye.
This is Sidney’s release day, but on leaving the clink and finding his house being demolished, he happens to bump into Willie, the woman with whom he used to share a flat in 1967 when he was “selling dried bananas to suckers as prime pot”. We thus find out that Sidney has always been a bit of a rogue, but basically a harmless one with his low-level cheeky chappy crimes, unlike the more dangerous Hicklar.
Caine gets to employ his underused slapstick skills here, last demonstrated in Without A Clue. The climactic chase through castle grounds involves Caine being hit on the head with a juggler’s club, stepping on crossed swords and getting hit on the bonce with the hilts, a tossed caber landing on his foot, and, last but not least, a tug of war rope being raised under his kilt and, presumably, chafing his unmentionables.
There is lots of work for Caine’s stuntman, with a dog biting his arm, Sidney swinging on a construction rope outside an apartment, a dramatic motorbike chase and some Caine-on-Caine cramped train carriage fighting as Sidney and Hicklar face off.
One of the film’s oddest creative choices is when Sidney sometimes chuckles to himself as he’s narrating in voiceover. “We looked so much like them, and they looked so much like us, I even I had trouble knowing who I was!” he laughs.
That forced jollity, as well as all the various indignities heaped on Caine’s person, could be cringeworthy in lesser hands. But overall, what should be a career low for Caine is buoyed by him giving such an enthusiastically silly performance. He commits fully to the idiocy and, miraculously, comes out of the whole thing relatively well.
Caine-nections: Caine is playing a scientist again, and is seen fiddling with some colourful liquids in a lab, as he did in Jekyll And Hyde.
He’s played Brits living in America plenty of times, but I believe that he has only once played an American prior to this film in Hurry Sundown (1967), although he would win his second Academy Award for playing one in The Cider House Rules (1999) later this decade. Keep your eyes peeled for that review.
Producer Menahem Golan was behind another of Caine’s misbegotten comedies, 1987’s Surrender.
Best Non-Caine Actor: This was Roger Moore’s first on-screen film performance since bowing out as Bond, ignobly being perved on by Q’s robot during a post-mission saucy shower, in 1985’s A View To A Kill.
That isn’t counting Moore’s vocal performance in 1987’s The Magic Snowman as “Lumi Ukko, the Snowman”. This mysterious film doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, and only 10 reviews on Letterboxd, but one of those reviews helpfully summarises the project as “A Yugoslavian Christmas movie about the creepiest looking snowman of all time [Moore] helping a young boy find fish.”
Unfortunately, unlike Daniel Craig and his Benoit Blanc mysteries, Lumi Ukko and his fish finding exploits didn’t spawn a similarly successful post-Bond franchise for Moore.
Sadly, Moore never had another hit as a leading man, and his remaining film career consisted of either small cameos in big films such as Spiceworld and The Saint (voice only), small supporting roles in a handful of misguided Hollywood projects like Boat Trip and The Quest, or significant parts in complete oddities that are now mostly forgotten, such as the winter sports stunts montage/product placement bonanza disguised as a film Fire, Ice And Dynamite (released the same year as Bullseye!). There was also the following year’s romantic drama Bed And Breakfast in which Rog washes up on a beach and is taken in by a household of women whom he, obviously, charms.
His latter-day IMDb is dotted with odd projects like the music video for Stakka Bo Living it Up and a short film titled The Fly Who Loved Me in which he plays Santa. His appearance in these, along with his involvement in the aforementioned The Magic Snowman, are not, as would first appear, the sign of severe gambling debts, but are because these are all projects associated with the charity UNICEF, of which Moore was an ambassador. There’s no such acceptable excuse for him voicing a cat called Tab Lazenby in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore though.
Back to Bullseye!, this film sees Rog at peak Moore camp. I can’t say he gives a conventionally good performance, but the obvious fun that he’s having while messing around with his pal Caine becomes infectious.
Moore plays “smooth-talking double crosser […] Hicklar’s partner, Sir John Bavistock”. We first see Bavistock being interviewed by an attractive female reporter and, in typical fashion, eyeing up her legs.
Soon after we are introduced to his other character, “cheap crook” Gerald Bradley-Smith (although credited as this, Sidney in voice over calls him Gerald Bradley-Scott). He has silver grey hair, whereas Bavistock had black hair, and we first see him dressed like a US military man stealing suitcases from outside a fancy hotel. There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason for him to be dressed like this, but it’s best to not dig too deep into this film’s logic.
Gerald is a lifelong scoundrel. Sidney reminisces that when they used to live together, “whenever I wanted a bath then, that selfish sod Gerald had taken all the hot water.” And after being told by Willie that he’s mellowed since, Sidney asserts; “His sort don’t mellow, they rot.” Perhaps explaining why he had to have such long baths.
It’s because of Gerald that Sidney ended up behind bars. Gerald was picked up for unpaid parking tickets and “sang like Madonna”, dobbing Sidney in to save his own skin. “He’s put so many partners in jail, they’ve named a wing after him,” we’re told, and Gerald even confesses to being a “card-carrying coward.”
The two eventually rebuild their trust and a stronger friendship emerges by the end, with Caine and Moore’s real friendship shining through.
Moore’s most unhinged acting, of perhaps his whole career, comes when, trying to get Hicklar’s lockbox key, Gerald goes to Hicklar’s house pretending to be a blind German piano tuner decked out in a Hulk Hogan stache, long white hair and a very silly accent. You can tell Moore enjoys messing about, with Winner not even trying to rein in his delightfully silly voice which at times devolves into a strained Germanic whine.
There’s plenty of signature Moore innuendos. Passing a busty saleswoman holding cheese samples asks; “Sir, can I press you for something soft?” He responds, “Why not? We’ll have the cheese afterwards.”
“I trust they’re genuine,” Gerald purrs, ostensibly referring to diamonds but actually looking at the chest of the lady handling them. He also reuses the old Bond classic, “Something’s come up.”
Sally Kirkland, mostly a supporting actor perhaps best known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in 1987’s Anna, is the female lead – Sidney and Gerald’s former partner in crime/flatmate/lover, Willie.
We’re introduced to Willie at her husband’s funeral, and get an idea of what sort of relationship this was when the priest says to her, “He had a good innings. After all, when I married you five years ago, the doctors said he only had six months to live.”
Willie responds, “I should have asked for a second opinion.”
Kirkland has good chemistry with both Caine and Moore. They’re believable as old pals but Kirkland sadly doesn’t get a ton to do as the other two get all the best scenes. Nevertheless, she’s a capable straight-woman anchor to the film’s overall silliness, and arguably comes out of the whole thing with the most dignity intact.
There’s a Mammia Mia-esque subplot involving the parentage of Flo Fleming, Willie’s secret daughter, the American spy who was working undercover at Hicklar’s lab and is now helping Sidney and Gerald. She’s played by Deborah Moore (here credited as Deborah Barrymore), Rog’s real-life daughter, explaining the joke at the end when it’s revealed that Sidney is her father, which results in Moore looking directly at the camera deadpanning, “Funny, I could have sworn she was my daughter.”
This moment must be baffling for anyone who didn’t know this trivia.
She’s an example of the bad kind of “nepo baby”, as I’m sure that she wouldn’t have gotten this role if her father wasn’t one of the leads. She’s quite wooden and had no real standout success as an actor, with her best-known work being the face of the Scottish Widows advertising campaign from 1986 to 1995.
However, the worst casting decision is the Queen Elizabeth II impersonator who we see inspecting a lawnmower. The corgis alongside her are doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting in helping the audience identify her as she looks absolutely nothing like her late Maj. Why didn’t they get the one from The Naked Gun? The Thatcher impersonator at the end of the film is more on point.
In a fun cameo during the film’s epilogue, John Cleese appears as “Man on the Beach in Barbados Who Looks Like John Cleese” whom Sidney is scouting out to play him in a film about his life. Then, over the end credits, we hear Sidney’s voice, “They say everyone in the world has someone somewhere who looks just like they do. It was my bad luck that I met a man on the beach in Barbados who looked just like that movie star John Cleese. We gave him the cash to make the film of our story and he turned out to be a conman who ran off with all our money.”
I actually found that goofy little coda quite amusing.
A quick note for Doctor Who fans: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart himself, Nicholas Courtney, pops up for a small, Brig-like role as Sir Hugh, the government’s chief scientific advisor.
Best Shot of the Movie: Sidney’s face is framed very small through the legs of the other Caine, Hicklar, in the train carriage for no particular reason. Michael Winner had style. Not good style. But it was a style.
My Bleedin’ Thoughts: This is a unique example of a ‘so bad it’s good’ comedy. Traditionally an unsuccessful comedy is a painful, intensely dull experience, but whatever strange alchemy was unleashed here by Winner’s gung-ho directing incompetence worked to create something entertainingly awful.
Admittedly some intentionally comedic moments work, but the overall film is chaotically slipshod and stuffed with bizarre creative choices that mean you’re often laughing at the film rather than with it.
It’s obvious from the opening titles that you’re in for something unique. Hicklar is inspecting beakers in a lab, accompanied by a dramatic score. He smiles and exclaims, “I’ve done it. Beautiful!” before he extracts a floppy disc from a computer while saying “Bullseye”. The title graphic appears out of the computer at the same time, and follows the path of the floppy disc, getting bigger as it moves across the screen. This, like much of the film’s subsequent content, is a completely unnecessary and distracting creative flourish.
The fact that the title contains an exclamation mark shows that this film means business. There are barely any filmmakers that have the balls to add punctuation to the end of their film titles. Michael Winner had those balls.
This neatly leads us to the motley crew behind this project. This was produced by Cannon Films’ Menahem Golan, who after Cannon’s financial collapse, became CEO of 21st Century Film Corporation Inc.
Michael Winner, prolific director of exploitative trash, also edited this film under his pseudonym Arnold Crust. Winner is perhaps now most associated with his “Calm down dear, it’s only a commercial” catchphrase used in esure Insurance TV adverts.
Winner was also repeatedly hospitalised for irresponsible dining. He acquired a bacterial infection after eating an oyster and was admitted to hospital with food poisoning after eating steak tartare four days in a row. Less amusingly he has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple actresses and professional negligence by a stuntman. Thus, based on his personal life, it’s no surprise that Bullseye! shows little restraint or considered thought.
I was surprised to see a story and screenplay credit given to Leslie Bricusse. The Leslie Bricusse who, along with Anthony Newley, wrote the music and lyrics for Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory and the iconic Bond themes (along with John Barry) for Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.
Also contributing to the screenplay were Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran who wrote the sitcoms The New Statesman, Birds Of A Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart and the score was provided by frequent Monty Python musical collaborator John Du Prez.
The score is often inappropriate, such as when the instrumental over the end credits slowly transitions from a cheery beach party vibe to serious thriller music over footage of a woman in a bikini relaxing on a deck chair. I did enjoy the cheesy funky music over the makeover montage though.
Winner doesn’t have the best command of tone, most notably demonstrated in the sequence of brutal train steward deaths which starts when a steward gets accidentally killed by a shotgun trap set for Gerald. His head is literally blown off, accompanied by a comedic popping effect, and smoke comes off the very clear mannequin that has replaced the actor.
Gerald looks into the camera quipping “I’ve heard of losing your head over a woman” before going to find Sidney. He tells him “There’s a dead steward in my room” before the steward in Sidney’s room is electrocuted. “You’ve got one too!” he exclaims as jaunty music plays over the tragic deaths of these young men, who likely had a family and loved ones.
Then another steward rushes past to call the police, picks up a phone and a spike goes through his mouth killing him instantly, in an incredibly disturbing visual that would be at home in a slasher movie or one of Winner’s Death Wish films, all while the jolly score continues in the background.
There are plenty of groan-inducing jokes. After Sidney’s house is demolished by a wrecking ball he says, “I come from a broken home”. After Sidney leaves prison, he runs after a bus and grabs the pole at the back which snaps off for no reason.
There are two running gags that are both initially amusing but quickly become irritating. One is a middle-aged American tourist couple where the wife keeps getting attacked or injured to the delight of her husband.
First, she’s grabbed by an Asian buyer who’s lost out on purchasing the energy plans. After the couple have been seen speaking to Flo and Willie, the buyer shouts, “What did they say? Tell me or she goes in the river!”
“I do not bow to terrorist threats,” the husband responds. The woman is then thrown into a small stream. This prompts the jubilant husband to shout at the fleeing assailant, “Hey fella, least let me buy you a drink!”
Later on, the woman falls into a lake, accidentally has a crate dropped on her head (which is filmed in a way that actually looks painful) and is later struck by a plant pot. The husband is psychotically elated, and so what on paper reads like a reasonably amusing running gag goes from being funny to disturbing.
The actress who plays the luckless wife was Mildred Shay, a 1930s film star and socialite dubbed the “Pocket Venus.” How the mighty have fallen.
The running joke of the Asian buyer following Flo and Willie and then, when they leave the scene, appearing unexpectedly and asking people “What did they say?” is also continued throughout the film. He does it to a train steward, a car saleswoman and, after being locked in a safe by the two ladies, Hicklar. Again, this is amusing at first, but spoiled by repetition and the somewhat racist music sting that accompanies this character.
Bullseye! isn’t above a fart joke, either. Bavistock poisons a train’s food supply, and there’s then plenty of parping sound effects, plus an unexpected appearance of a young Patsy Kensit as a woman with the oncoming shits, in what I imagine is an early career highlight. Kensit gets one line: “We’re going to sue over this you know!”
This film provides one truly unexpected sight, which will live with me forever. Needing to find a way to retrieve a key that is on the collar of Bavistock’s big vicious dog, Gerald comes up with a plan.
They drive by Bavistock, walking his dog, in a flatbed van with a long-haired, well-groomed dog on the back. Bavistock’s dog, overcome with lust, jumps onto the truck. We then see the car driving past a nun accompanying schoolchildren, and get a good look at Bavistock’s dog now humping the other stony-faced canine as triumphant music plays. I think/hope these are some sort of puppets and Winner didn’t just cruise around London with two shagging dogs, although I wouldn’t put that past him.
They then take the randy dog to a makeshift mutt brothel and wait until he’s shagged out so they can take the key from his collar as he sleeps.
“It’s like leading Rob Lowe around on a leash, isn’t it?” Gerald says of the lascivious canine.
There are plenty more cringey pop culture references. Regarding his plastic surgery, Sidney asks; “What do you think they do with all the bits they cut off?”
Gerald responds, “Well, they join them all together and they make Michael Jackson.”
“Anyone ever tell you, you look like Mel Gibson?” Sidney says to the scary looking foreign buyer. And, as Gerald walks off with a beautiful woman, Gerald says into the camera lens, “Nice isn’t it? He gets Kim Basinger and I get Nightmare On Elm Street!”
Trivia (courtesy of IMDb): The final scenes had the smallest crew on a major movie. Winner operated the camera and cameraman David Wynn-Jones held the reflector while John Cleese moonlighted as the sound man by concealing the sound recorder in the book he was carrying while performing.
Unsurprisingly, given everything we know about him, Sally Kirkland said Winner was a huge misogynist and used to scream at her constantly. Caine, ever the gentleman, made sure to be on set all the time, even when he wasn’t scheduled to work, to get Winner to behave himself around her.
Overall Thoughts: I can in no good conscience recommend this movie. It is objectively a very bad film. But due to my fond feelings towards both Caine and Moore I had a lot of fun with this, although more often I was laughing at the film than with it.
Rating: 3/5 Exploding Haggises
Where You Can Watch This: This is currently available to purchase or rent digitally from the usual places (if you dare) but seems to be out of print on physical media in the UK.
Up Next: It’s Caine in another forgotten comedy, but in a supernatural supporting role this time, alongside Jim Belushi in Mr Destiny.
A video essay version of this article is available on YouTube.
