D | A pirate master searches for treasure. Directed by Renny Harlin Starring Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, and Frank Langella Initial Review by Jon Kissel |
Carolco Pictures went from producing the Rambo series, Basic Instinct, and Terminator 2 to losing the 2017 equivalent of $147 million on Cutthroat Island, incidentally the last film they released before declaring bankruptcy. Of course, there’s often a wide distance between commercial and critical success. A film can be a masterpiece and a complete flop, or make a lot of money while being a piece of shit. The failure on one side does not guarantee failure on the other. This is not the case with Cutthroat Island. Though it’s surprising that it was such a flop, as it at least looks like it could fool enough people with a decent poster or a trailer that cuts out most of the dialogue, Renny Harlin’s swashbuckling disaster is disgraceful and amateurish. It is good and right that people lost their jobs after putting their seal of approval on Cutthroat Island.
With bad movies, it’s easy to get hung up on baffling details, and that’s what happened to me as early as the third or fourth scene. This is a straightforward story of treasure hunting: find the three parts of a map, decipher it, and find the treasure. Multiple parties are looking for it, and the thing writes itself. Where the film instantly loses me is when Morgan (Geena Davis), the unstoppable daughter of a captain, cradles her dying father and is told with his last breath to shave his head. Weird, where are we going with this. Turns out a third of the map has been tattooed on his scalp and Morgan carries it around with her for the rest of the film, whipping out this rotting piece of dad flesh whenever she needs to get her bearings. At one point, she pulls it out of her underwear. No one comments on this in the film, but I am so fixated on such a macabre and unnecessary detail that the film is immediately broken. Can’t transcribe it onto a secondary piece of parchment, can you, Morgan? The scalp map is the Poochie of Cutthroat Island in that whenever it’s not onscreen, I’m asking ‘where’s the scalp map’?
This small detail is indicative of a complete obliviousness to how the characters are coming off. The film wants me to think that Chris Masterson’s young pirate overcoming his fear to stab a guy in the butt is heroic, but all he did was stab someone when they weren’t looking. No other way to show a reasonable tertiary arc than that? Is pulling a musket ball out of a person a deeply romantic act, or a functional one that might endear the remover to the removee somewhere down the road? Harlin thinks it’s the former, which makes me worry for any medical staff who might operate on him. Exactly how funny is it when our protagonists charge through a funeral procession and knock the dessicated corpse onto the ground, where it spills out of the coffin and falls to pieces? What’s most funny about this scene is that anyone thought it would be. Davis’s shockingly stilted performance and the absence of any charisma from the rest of the cast is completing the dilemma. Even the monkey is a pain. I’ve never rooted for a dead primate more than when Morgan tentatively opens its hiding place after a mutiny.
So Harlin’s not great with actors. It’s fine that directors might be better on the technical side, except that Cutthroat Island also has out of focus shots and forgets to cut out bloopers. Poor Matthew Modine looked like he at least got dazed by that stray barrel bonking him on the head at 42:50. Awful green screen work complements something so perfunctory as a carriage ride, and if it’s bad when the stakes are so low, it’s not improving when it’s needed. The action is unimaginative, substituting explosions for creativity, but then, why should there be imagination in the choreography when there’s none in the whole film. Case in point: Morgan needlessly tells her crew late in the film to hoist her colors. There could be anything on that flag, but it’s just a standard skull and crossbones. Cutthroat Island is always lazy and never surprising.
The best thing that can be said about this is that it closes in on good-bad territory. There are spiteful laughs to be had here, though at about 40 minutes too long, they’re more spread out than they need to be for bad-movie rewatchability. Cutthroat Island deserves its reputation as one of the worst films of the 90’s. It’s a shame Geena Davis, often great, pretty much exhausted her credibility here, but Harlin gets to go on and direct middling schlock like Deep Blue Sea. Frank Langella being insane, a single scene of characters being clever, and the extensive set design save this from an F, but just barely. I have a feeling that the sequel heavily hinted at in the closing speech is never going to happen. D-
This small detail is indicative of a complete obliviousness to how the characters are coming off. The film wants me to think that Chris Masterson’s young pirate overcoming his fear to stab a guy in the butt is heroic, but all he did was stab someone when they weren’t looking. No other way to show a reasonable tertiary arc than that? Is pulling a musket ball out of a person a deeply romantic act, or a functional one that might endear the remover to the removee somewhere down the road? Harlin thinks it’s the former, which makes me worry for any medical staff who might operate on him. Exactly how funny is it when our protagonists charge through a funeral procession and knock the dessicated corpse onto the ground, where it spills out of the coffin and falls to pieces? What’s most funny about this scene is that anyone thought it would be. Davis’s shockingly stilted performance and the absence of any charisma from the rest of the cast is completing the dilemma. Even the monkey is a pain. I’ve never rooted for a dead primate more than when Morgan tentatively opens its hiding place after a mutiny.
So Harlin’s not great with actors. It’s fine that directors might be better on the technical side, except that Cutthroat Island also has out of focus shots and forgets to cut out bloopers. Poor Matthew Modine looked like he at least got dazed by that stray barrel bonking him on the head at 42:50. Awful green screen work complements something so perfunctory as a carriage ride, and if it’s bad when the stakes are so low, it’s not improving when it’s needed. The action is unimaginative, substituting explosions for creativity, but then, why should there be imagination in the choreography when there’s none in the whole film. Case in point: Morgan needlessly tells her crew late in the film to hoist her colors. There could be anything on that flag, but it’s just a standard skull and crossbones. Cutthroat Island is always lazy and never surprising.
The best thing that can be said about this is that it closes in on good-bad territory. There are spiteful laughs to be had here, though at about 40 minutes too long, they’re more spread out than they need to be for bad-movie rewatchability. Cutthroat Island deserves its reputation as one of the worst films of the 90’s. It’s a shame Geena Davis, often great, pretty much exhausted her credibility here, but Harlin gets to go on and direct middling schlock like Deep Blue Sea. Frank Langella being insane, a single scene of characters being clever, and the extensive set design save this from an F, but just barely. I have a feeling that the sequel heavily hinted at in the closing speech is never going to happen. D-
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