Renny Harlin drops a small countries entire GDP into a wild pirate film with jaw dropping stunts, dangerous pyrotechnics, and a soggy script that threatens to sink the whole thing!
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
Flashing blades, roaring cannons, daring rogues swinging through the air to the aid of their true loves and to battle dastardly villains – there’s a definitive image, however ephemeral in exact detail, that comes to mind when you hear the word “swashbuckler.” Stories of romantic adventure in this vein stretch back at least to the days of Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers, Baroness Orczy’s Scarlett Pimpernel, and Sir Walter Scott’s Wilfred of Ivanhoe, and they’ve been mined for cinematic adaptation and inspiration almost since the birth of the medium, and their influence can be seen from Jack Sparrow’s Caribbean to galaxies far, far away. This month sees Cinapse’s team looking at nearly a century of swashbuckling sagas from their black-and-white roots to the brand-new reinventions of the form to examine why these tales are so enticing, so timeless, and who told them the best.
The Pick: Cutthroat Island (1995)
This week on Two Cents, we jump ahead 60 years, trading out the wit and repartee of Eroll Flynn for the bombastic stunts and effects of Renny Harlin. Holding the title of one of the biggest box office bombs in cinema history, Cutthroat Island is not some poor man’s attempt at swashbuckling, but a genuinely awe inspiring spectacle of pyrotechnics and death defying stunts, where every last cent of the budget is up on screen (but never showed back up at the box office). Made at the peak of Harlin’s career, starring his new bride Geena Davis and a baby faced Matthew Modine, as well as a bevy of character actors, here is what the scoundrels of Cinapse had to say about this wild ‘90s pirate spectacle.
The Team
Spencer Brickey
Cutthroat Island is a lot of things; a swashbuckling adventure through the Caribbean, an insane money sink that bankrupted Carolco, a vanity project between newlyweds that they called their honeymoon, and one of the worst box office disasters of all time. What it really is, or at least what anyone should care about, is a collection of some of the most dangerous stunts and awe inspiring pyrotechnics put to screen.
Following the adventures of Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) and her crew of pirates, Cutthroat Island hits all the classic swashbuckling tropes; hidden Spanish treasure, competing pirates searching for the same riches, the meddling “government” looking for their piece of the pie, plenty of sword fights and naval battles, and gallons of rum consumed. What really sets Cutthroat Island apart, though, is the wizardry on screen when it comes to stunts and effects. At this point, director Renny Harlin was at the peak of his career, coming off of the success of both Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger. What he did with that blank check is make a film that throws its straight up A list stars into actual stunt work. Geena Davis and Matthew Modine are actually doing all the stunts on set, which include swinging between ships (and high up in the masts), jumping through windows (there is a stunt/visual effect here, with Geena jumping on a wagon, that I had to rewind 3 times to try and figure out how the fuck they did it), and barely escaping massive fireballs every few minutes.
If you’re not impressed with the stunts, the pyrotechnics on display should be enough to knock your socks off. Everything explodes here; be it random barrels, ships at sea, or even a regular old chandelier. And they don’t just explode, they explode BIG. Massive, sky high fireballs accompany every action on screen, turning the world into a borderline hellscape. There is a scene, of two ships firing upon each other, that looks so chaotic and violent it’s almost disorienting. All if this of course leads to one final explosion, as we watch a large pirate ship explode into a million pieces of shrapnel and fire. It is an absolute beaut.
Is Cutthroat Island some sort of hidden gem? Not really. The casting just does not work, and the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. But, for those looking for something to turn their brain off for, and just get lost in the chaos on screen, Cutthroat Island is a film for you
Brendan Agnew
Cutthroat Island is a movie I kinda love – and think is genuinely good – in spite of itself. The 1995 pirate blockbuster is obviously a passion project by Die Hard 2: Die Harder director Renny Harlin, but showcases his strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker at their utmost. On the one hand, the cast is a lot of fun (though I’ll go to my grave believing that Cary Elwes in the Matthew Modine role would add a whole extra star to this movie), the sets and costumes and pirate-y ephemera look great, and the score by John Debney is driving and operatic and full of hummable riffs we beg for in modern spectacle films.
But most importantly, this is one of the greatest collections of high-skill stunt-heavy set pieces of the decade. It’s like the filmmakers decided to cram in every cool “pirate thing” they could think of and then over-deliver. There’s not a saloon brawl in Cutthroat – there’s a saloon shoot-out cum explosive melee that feels ripped from James Bond-by-way-of-Robert Louis Stevenson. You can feel the love for the cinematic legacy of pirate adventure films as we get reenactments of the Captain Blood auction scene with a ‘90s diesel twist, alongside the director’s “kid in a candy store” energy as he cashed every check his earlier hits had given him. And Geena Davis proves game for everything asked of her, and more – I’m still not sure I believe the horse stunt she pulls off in this movie, even though you can clearly see her face as she crashes through a window onto a moving carriage to summersault into the driver’s seat in the same fucking shot. And the final ship-to-ship battle remains among the best of its kind even to this day in terms of sheer destructive production.
If the script were as good as the spectacle, this would be a true all-timer alongside the likes of The Rock. Unfortunately, they’re not. While the film offers a fun group of buccaneers to follow on the treasure hunt to the titular isle, it feels both slightly overstuffed and under-dramatized. The inciting incident – Davis’ Morgan Adams inheriting a piece of a map from her father as he lies dying at the hands of her uncle – is ripe for swashbuckling melodrama, but the film never truly capitalizes on the pieces it has. Mostly it just shuffles people around the board with double dealings and triple-crosses until it’s time to blow everything up, and while Langella is belting for the bleachers and a blast to watch, it can feel like a lot of marking time until Act 3.
Fortunately, Act 3 is legit amazing, giving every one of Morgan’s main crew members mini-arcs during a gigantic broadside battle while Davis and Langella buckle every swash from sheets to gundeck. It’s hard not to yearn for the better film this could have been shaped into, but it’s still a rock solid example of the kind of practical stunt-heavy high concept “original” blockbuster we claim to yearn for these days.
Brendan Foley
When you look at the line-up of huge box office failures, the actual quality of the movie is rarely the most determining factor. There are numerous examples of excellent films bombing because of competition, lousy marketing, or simply being too ahead of the culture. It happens all the time.
Not this time though.
Is Cutthroat Island so terrible that it deserved to be a record-breaking, studio-shuttering, genre-killing dud?
No.
Is Cutthroat Island any good?
FUCK no.
There are some folks in our cinema celebrating community with love in their hearts for Renny Harlin but my heart is closed for business to that dude and all his hackwork that don’t involve Samuel L. Jackson getting bitten in half by a terrible CGI shark. Cutthroat Island is loaded with truly spectacular stunt and pyrotechnic work and all of it (ALL OF IT) lands with a bigger thud than this movie’s box office because Harlin has no idea how to stage, shoot, or cut action. Between the frantic editing and the hideously mistimed and overused slow motion, it’s like he’s going out of his way to sabotage any chance of the movie being even a turn-your-brain off good time by tanking the action.
It doesn’t help matters that the script is a jumble of poorly realized cliches, only made more embarrassing in hindsight when films like Curse of the Black Pearl and Master & Commander reminded us of how much juice those classical tropes and clichés still had so long as you actually utilize them properly.
I wish I could say that at least the cast is giving it their all, but both Geena Davis and Matthew Modine look out of place and uncomfortable. They don’t just lack chemistry, they appear to be actively repelling each other like magnetic poles. The script is loaded with banter and one liners, all of which are about as successful as Carolco Picture’s tax return that year. Davis and Modine, terrific actors!, deliver their every stilted line as if they learned the words phonetically a minute before Harlin called “Action”.
Langella is pretty good.
A film that clearly either sinks or swims with the pirate crew here at Cinapse! To give some numbers to this historic flop, the film cost $115 million dollars to shoot, and only made $10 million at the box office, netting a $105 million lose (adjusted for inflation, that’s a $220 million dollar loss). Quite the bit of pirate booty was lost on this journey, it seems. But, don’t worry, the clashing of swords and explosion of cannons has just begun here on Two Cents!
March: Swashbuckling Adventure On and Off the High Seas
Our month of Swashbuckling continues all March, culminating in the two-part adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel!
March 17 – Hook (Digital Rental / Purchase – 2 hours 21 minutes)
March 24 – The Court Jester (Digital Rental / Purchase – 1 hour 41 minutes)
March 31 – The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Hulu – 2 hrs 1 minute) / Milady (Hulu – 1 hour 55 minutes)
And We’re Out.
