Epic Adventure for the shallowest and deepest amongst us

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2005)

I was charged with entertaining my father-in-law one afternoon while my wife and female in-laws went out shopping together. I showed him this film to keep him from pestering me to death as I worked on the computer. After the story was finished he kept coming up to me and saying, "That was some movie!" This from a man who considers John Wayne the only great actor; the western and war story the only films worth watching; a man who cannot watch the simplest mystery without interrupting twenty times, "What's going on?" He must have told me a dozen times that afternoon and evening, "That was some movie." Yeah, the old bird was right. "The Man Who Would be King" displays human nature in rawest form and human friendship at its most loyal in a timeless plot that spans perhaps one year and yet 2200 years at the same time. This is classic story-telling at its best for the most unsophisticated and most erudite among us. Michael Caine's wife Shakira plays Roxanne for you trivia buffs. A model from Guyana born from a Muslim-East Indian family she became Miss Guyana and was third in Miss World in 1967 at the age of 19. She co-starred in this film and gave up further film aspirations to raise their daughter Natasha.