Michael Caine is marvelous when playing a happy villain. He was impossibly beautiful as a young man, but middle aged Michael with serious bags under his eyes and a slight weight problem has an air of wounded vanity, as if he can’t quite understand how things went wrong.
Caine, as Graham Marshall, is a fairly successful marketing director with an expensive home, an expensive and slightly boring wife, and is desperately anticipating a promotion for his many years of diligence. He is stunned when he is passed over for a young, brash associate. Graham has an epiphany when a particularly smarmy panhandler enrages him, and Graham impulsively shoves him off the subway platform in the path of an oncoming train. No one has seen him and Graham muses on his “magical” powers. He quickly and cleverly dispatches the wife and the business rival, gets rid of his white elephant of a house in the suburbs, boards the pets and gets a tasteful apartment in Manhattan. Though homicide Lt. Laker (Will Patton with a splendid Long Island accent) is suspicious, nothing can be proved. Graham not only gets the promotion, he has his eye on taking over the company, dispatching his rivals on his upward climb.
What keeps the tension intact is the victims are not cartoon-like villains. The wife is irritating, but not evil. The youngster who beat him out for the promotion is vulgar, but it is clear he is clever and competent. We just cannot help but cheer Graham on his nefarious way. Michael Caine’s glee and satisfaction are catching.
There is more than a whiff of Alec Guinness’s “Kind Hearts and Coronets” in Caine’s performance, but Michael Caine has a knack for villainy all his own. “Shock to the System” may be a trifle of a movie, but it is a highly enjoyable trifle. ….
Shock to the System