The Jigsaw Man (1983)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

So long as you are aware that you're about to watch a truly terrible terrible movie, you can sit back and enjoy the full extent of its absolute awfulness! Michael Caine doing some incredibly bad accents whilst karate chopping people to death with a single blow (he even manages to render a policeman unconscious by tripping him up!), Susan George being her usual am-dram hammy self, Robert Powell portraying the world's poshest policeman, and Lawrence Olivier either grumbling and gesticulating melodramatically or pausing abruptly because he's forgotten his next line. And who could blame him?! Everyone has been asked to utter dialogue so monumentally bad it has to be heard to be believed! After the highly amusing car chase climax, Caine suddenly turns philosopher and decides that "War is bad" - classic stuff! Everything about this film is bad, the script, the sets, the acting, the accents, the direction, the editing, the stunts, even the music's awful! But badness of this magnitude should be celebrated and enjoyed for what it is, and for this reason I have given this magnificent mess a 10 star rating! The only puzzle about this jigsaw is how it ever got to see the light of day!

Made after some of the best spy drama movies, including the TV adaptation of Le Carre's Smiley's People, you have to wonder how they got it so wrong. And with Michael Caine, Olivier and Charles Gray! And with the director of the grittiest early Bond movies! It was totally ridiculous as a story and as a film, but also hugely endearing to a Brit who has lived in Asia for over 25 years. I got the same pleasure watching this as I did in seeing the sets wobble in "The Builders" episode of Fawlty Towers. The whole thing wobbled, especially the acting. Oliver's mention of the leather chair to Michael Medwin was the only finely delivered line.

I saw this movie with my girlfriend, now wife, in 1984. Being the only two people in the theater on the second day of the movie should have given us a clue but that fact only really made sense when we left the theater 45 minutes later, well before the end. Expecting a decent thriller, Michael Caine worthy, we couldn't grasp the fact that this movie made it into the cinema in the first place! Of course I was 20 year younger then and i have seen some very, very bad movies since but none of them made the impression "The Jigsaw Man" did! Since that day my wife and I qualify bad, boring movies as "Even The Jigsaw Man was better". This movie has played a major part in our movie-viewing life for the last 20 years as THE "Bad Movie Benchmark".

This is probably the worst film I've ever seen. Though it seems to be a thriller, I spent the first twenty minutes of it thinking it was a comedy à la Leslie Nielsen; then I realised it didn't mean to be funny. The lines give the word "poor" a new sense. Cheap. I watched it on a coach trip, and contributed to make the trip rather miserable.