Connery and Caine should have made more buddy films

Rating: 10/10 (11 September 2018)

Throughout this film they have a natural chemistry, Caine with his pushy type-A ego, and Connery with his brooding scowl. The scale and scope of the film is enormous, from train stations to mountains to full-scale battles. You know you're in for a rough ride when Michael Caine throws a guy off a train for eating a watermelon. The film has a real heart at its center, and you forget that Connery is supposed to be a con man, when for the first time in his life he's presented with an opportunity to change the world...power, people, and money right at his fingertips, no one could blame him for wanting these things, and the character reversal, with Connery's character in the lead instead of Caine's, must have been an eye-opener for the latter. But as with all things in life, it all ends with a mummified head. I doubt they could make a film this ambitious nowadays, I'm sure someone would be offended at fictionalized territorialism, or subjugation of humans, or the implication that any human being could be as ignorant as the mountain folk shown in the story. It's almost a perfect tale, except for the housefly crawling over the obviously still picture of the mountain 1/3 of the way through, don't know how that escaped the editor.