Directed by John Frankenheimer | Written by George Axelrod, Edward Anhalt, and John Hopkins, based on the Robert Ludlum novel | 112 min | ▲▲ | Prime 

I’ve seen a lot of the movies Michael Caine made in the 1980s where, famously, he said yes to everything. Jaws 4: The Revenge, for example, in 1987. Caine was always professional, whatever the quality of the film he was in. That’s certainly the case with The Holcroft Covenant, a thriller adapting a book by Robert Ludlum , the writer of the Bourne franchise. Caine is playing, in his own words, “a foreign-born American citizen,” which I *guess* explains his cockney accent? It’s not really clear, which is but one of the problems with this picture from legendary filmmaker Frankenheimer of the Manchurian Candidate, The Train, and Seconds fame. I think it’s fair to say his later work is a little less consistent.

Caine is Noel Holcroft, a Manhattan architect who is approached by a Swiss banker (Michael Lonsdale, who will always be a Bond villain to me) and offered a huge fortune in Nazi loot. In the dying days of the Reich, Holcroft’s father, financier to Hitler, saw the error of his ways and teamed up with two other regret-filled Nazis to squirrel away Germany’s extra funds to this Swiss vault. Holcroft will manage the funds, but needs to secure the signature of the descendants of the others in the covenant of the title.

Cue a lot of international travel as various supporting characters parcel out information to Holcroft and tell him he’s in a lot of danger — he’s an everyman lost in the mud of global espionage. Off he flies to Geneva, London, and Berlin, posing in front of all the recognizable landmarks and tourist spots as he meets up with British intelligence, German anti-Nazi power brokers, journalists and classical conductors — played by a solid cadre of performers: Anthony Andrews, Richard Münch, Shane Rimmer, Bernard Hepton, with Lilli Palmer as Holcroft’s mother and a vivacious Victoria Tennant as Helden von Tiebolt, one of the other offspring.

Here’s the thing:  Helden is the very model of a Hitchcock blonde and literally a child of a Nazi. If Hollywood movies have taught us anything it’s that she’s going to be duplicitous, and Tennant doesn’t do much to make us think otherwise. We understand why Holcroft falls in love with her while we never believe anything she says. Her older brother who is the actual covenant signatory, Johaan (Andrews), we meet him at a London equestrian club riding horses at midnight. Red flags everywhere.

Meanwhile Caine glides over and through the many plot holes and implausibilities, never letting his accent or some new twist shift him from the centre of this production. It might be silly, and Holcroft might be an entirely anemic hero without much agency, but Caine never is anything but committed. And that helps carry this movie from just bad to bad-enough-to-be-good.

A particular joy for Nova Scotians: keep your eyes peeled for a cameo early in the film from actor-writer-director Shelley Thompson as Holcroft’s “Executive Secretary.”