Michael Caine can give a bad performance - he looks really bored in this movie, which has him as a doctor in Africa whose doctor wife (Beverly Johnson) is kidnapped by modern day slave traders.
This film has some good things in it - location filmmaking in Africa, Johnson is stunning and not a bad actor, the script is simple, the cast is consistently interesting, I didn't mind cameos from William Holden as a chopper pilot (killed quite quickly) and Rex Harrison as an anti slaver, Kabir Bedi has a lot of charisma.
But the music is that awful 70s TV music, Peter Ustinov is absurd as a villainous Arab, it's a bit slow at almost two hours, with no pace, speed or interesting acting. It needed more character work - more dynamics between Caine and Johnson, Caine and Bedi and Johnson needed someone to interact with in the slave group. It's not awful just dull.
George MacDonald Fraser did some uncredited work on the script to beef up Omar Sharif's role. The producer of this was going to make Tai Pan which Fraser had adapted.
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