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Cutthroat Island

8/1/2018

3 Comments

 

D
​1.05

A pirate master searches for treasure.

Directed by Renny Harlin
Starring Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, and Frank Langella
Initial Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
​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-
3 Comments
Lane
8/1/2018 10:19:29 pm

It is interesting to watch “Cutthroat Island” just a day before “Mission Impossible: Fallout” hits theaters. Though I’m sure it will be a week or so before I see the new MI (because I don’t like crowds or sitting near people in a theater), I can imagine there is a kinship between these two movies. They are based in the fundamentals of intrigue and the action that results. The new MI seems poised to be the action films that will define 2018; CI seems to…well, hell, I don’t know what it was trying to do.

Scratch that, I do know what it was trying to do…pirate movie for a new era. Errol Flynn rebooted. Action oriented period piece. The problem is, Renny Harlin probably got pegged to make this film a few years before it’s time. It was only eight years later that the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” came out, but the tone and skill of filmmaking between the two seems generations apart. Harlin was trying to appeal to viewer’s nostalgia and hunger for spectacle; Verbinski understood that star power and special effects are what would power 21st century blockbusters. I’ll give Frank Langella props for playing a pretty good bad pirate, but everybody else seems like California surfers playing dress-up.

The writing in this film is horrible…just horrible. Truly awful. Hard to overstate. I almost don’t blame the acting, also horrific, but what did they have to work with?

One thing I did like? The animals. You just don’t see $100 million dollars worth of horses and monkeys in film anymore. That was fun.

That’s all I’ve got…this movie was pretty awful.

Grade: D

Reply
Mark Alan. Chorba
4/24/2024 07:14:21 am

I've had pirert. Toys sence a child. Was iduckted. Sea. Fair piritas1976 But did not have enough time to join.on all bases the movie is my Favorit.

Reply
Sean
8/7/2018 10:41:17 am

Sometimes expectation and reputation can fuel a movie watching experience and set an unfair tone. Most of the time, it's an overly hyped up movie that you end up liking but not as much as you otherwise could. In special cases, like The Room, it's so terrible that it's such a fantastic failure it becomes a phenomenon. I admit, I was hoping for more of a Room like experience from Cutthroat Island and was just left with a bad movie. That really is how to become one of the most famous box office flops in history. Make an expensive, shitty movie but don't do anything so egregiously bad it develops an ironic fanbase.

Script-awful
Davis and Modine- super boring- both have decades of solid work in their careers but wow they sucked here. Modine tries harder but he's got nothing to work with.
Langella tells everyone his favorite role ever was Skeletor in Master's of the Universe and enjoyed his role here because he gets to play someone so ridiculous it's fun to him. Does that make him a genius actor who can disengage from the movie and be into his part or a bit of a narcissist who gets off on being larger than life and hamming it up. Either way he's the best part of both movies.

In a movie full of half-assed special effects the best was obviously during the final battle. Two ships, clearly sitting stationary in a sound stage pool just blasting at each other at close range. Explosions galore and wait a minute, shouldn't there be more holes in the sides of these boats? Also a great shot of 5 British sailors standing on deck and an explosion hits behind them- were they facing the wrong way?

I'm going with D+. It sucked sure but I watched while screwing around on my phone so it wasn't so bad.

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