Saturday, March 23, 2024

Film Review - The Great Escaper (2024)

The Great Escaper stars Michael Caine as Bernie Jordan, a World War 2 veteran who now lives in an England rest home with his wife Irene (Glenda Jackson) and when he is unable to go to an event celebrating 70 years of the D-Day landing he makes his own way to France and comes to learn about the place he helped to liberate all those years before.

The Great Escaper is a very good film and one of the bright spots of this early period of 2024 as a movie year and it does this by telling a good story and telling it rather well for the most part.

The first way it does this is it feels like this movie pays tribute to that particular generation who went and fought the great war of that time in World War II and the scars those who survived and came home would live with, at one point Irene says in the movie that the War was their business and we see the effect it had on her not long afterwards and there is also a moving scene in a bar with Bernie and some German officers (one of which is played by Wolf Kahler from Raiders of the Lost Ark) and you see the bridges that some try to mend all those decades on.

And secondly this movie feels like as much a tribute to Michael Caine as an actor as this has been stated that this is to be his final film role and watching him in this movie it is easy to see why as he looks frail and not as energetic as he normally is in a lot of his earlier roles and watching him play a man who needs a walker to get around was a little saddening to a certain degree but he has picked a great way to end his long and storied career.

And so that was the Great Escaper and it is a good story told well for the most part with some moving moments and a great final role for Michael Caine, 3 out of 5.

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