When I
interviewed Shane Black in 2005, he told this story: "I sold the
script [for Long Kiss Goodnight] because
Renny Harlin and Geena Davis were available. And the very next day, Renny said,
'Uh, I forgot to tell you something. There's this contractual thing, and I
might have to go do another movie first.' And that was Cutthroat
Island… one of
the biggest bombs of the decade." After Cutthroat Island, Black's thinking apparently went from "Sweet! Renny
Harlin and Geena Davis are totally going to make my movie!" to "Oh shit! Renny
Harlin and Geena Davis are totally going to make my movie!"
Cutthroat
Island was such a disaster that it damaged
the careers of people who had nothing to do with it, like Shane Black. It was
downright toxic to its principals. It once held the Guinness World Record for
biggest box-office flop of all time. Along with Showgirls, it drove its production company, Carolco, out of
business. It helped destroy Davis' career as a leading lady, and Matthew
Modine's career as a leading man outside the direct-to-video fringe. It made Baby
Jesus cry. It caused widows to weep openly in the street. I don't know how, but
it's somehow responsible for the AIDS crisis in Africa, global warming, and
Dane Cook's popularity. Moviegoers left theaters so angry that many burned
Modine in effigy during bloody, fatality-filled riots.
Even more
disastrously, it gave me very little to write about. Consequently, this will be
one of the shortest My Year Of Flops entries in recent memory. I know I also
promised to write about a slew of other pirate movies here, but I simply ran
out of time. Maybe I'll discuss the likes of Ice Pirates and Roman Polanski's Pirates in my newly launched My Year Of Flops: Rejected
Rejects column.
Davis wracked
up an impressive résumé before Cutthroat Island, with roles in hits like The Fly, Beetlejuice, Thelma &
Louise, A League Of Their Own, Tootsie, and Fletch. It's telling, however, that those were all movies
that Geena Davis appeared in. They weren't Geena Davis movies. Yet Cutthroat
Island was unmistakably a Geena Davis
vehicle, though it didn't start out that way.
Michael Douglas
was reportedly offered $15 million to play the male lead, but he pulled out,
claiming that the filmmakers beefed up Davis' role at the expense of his
character. In a wholly unrelated development, Davis was shtupping Harlin at the
time. The role was consequently offered to more or less every actor in
Hollywood, including Keanu Reeves, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeff Bridges,
Ralph Fiennes, Michael Keaton, Charlie Sheen, Liam Neeson, and Tim Robbins, all
of whom turned it down in spite of being offered ungodly sums of money. You
know a film is in trouble when not even a $7 million paycheck can convince
Charlie Fucking Sheen to spend a few months waving around a plastic sword right
next to the cleavage of Amazonian sex bomb Geena Davis. Can you even imagine
how many coked-up lapdances $7 million would buy?
Finally, the
filmmakers settled on everyone's 11th-favorite choice, Matthew Modine, who a
year earlier, played Jacob of biblical fame in a TNT cable movie. So instead of
pairing Davis with one of cinema's biggest stars, the filmmakers were making a $100
million movie with a guy coming off such blockbusters as The Browning
Version, Bye Bye Love, and Fluke. Who can forget Fluke? For
that matter, who can remember it?
In a textbook
case of the tail wagging the dog, producer Mario Kassar started building
elaborate sets for the film before the revised first draft of the screenplay
was ready. As with so many flops, the script became an afterthought. The
question wasn't, "Do we have a story worth telling, populated by characters
worth caring about?" but rather, "Man, can you believe how awesome this pirate-ship
set looks? The dailies are gonna be off the hook!"
Cutthroat
Island casts Davis as the daughter of
legendary pirate Harris Yulin. When Yulin is murdered by his nefarious brother
(Frank Langella), Davis commandeers dear old dad's pirate ship and sets off in
search for hidden treasure. In her mad quest for gold, Davis recruits the
services of liar, thief, and conman Modine, who is introduced crashing a
high-class party sporting Errol Flynn's rakish beard/mustache combo and Cher's
flowing cascades of curly black hair.
After
purloining a guest's valuables, he's thrown in prison, where Davis buys him as
a slave/Latin interpreter. (The two always go together.) In a gender reversal
that's nowhere as interesting or subversive as it should be, Davis is the
two-fisted, brawling, swashbuckling lead, and Modine is the dainty blonde,
lightweight sidekick, the obligatory love interest, as it were.
Cutthroat
Island never gives audiences an opportunity
to know these characters before it throws them into one technically impressive
but empty, unaffecting setpiece after another, from a mad chase through the
crowded streets of the Caribbean to skirmishes with Langella's ship.
Throughout my
tortured adolescence, I nursed a schoolgirl crush on Geena Davis, so the
prospect of her playing a sexy pirate lady in a sexy-pirate-lady movie filled
me with feverish anticipation. Yet her performance is curiously sexless and
dour. Then again, even Oscar-winning thespians have trouble breathing life and
humor into dialogue like the following:
"I will fly his
bloody head as my banner!"
"You're a very
beautiful woman. I'd like to wash your feet."
"You like to
wash things, do you? Start with your mouth."
[Modine to Davis
while they're being chased.] "I'm in favor of exercise, but you owe me an
explanation."
[Davis after crashing
through a store window.] "I must visit that shop again. When I have more time."
"A ship! I find
myself being fired on by an entire ship!"
"Mordechai's up
there, scared as a goose. Back to the wall, pistols out."
"Since you lie
so easily and since you are so shallow, I shall lie you in a shallow grave."
"Since I am so
charitable, I will maroon you on a rock the size of this table, instead of
splattering your brains across my bunkhead as you deserve.
"Morgan, in
sweet memory of bouncing you on my knee as a little girl, I'm going to ask you
just one time for your daddy's map."
"Would you
settle for the point of my cutlass?"
With banter
that brilliant, is it any wonder Marc Norman, one of a mere six credited
screenwriters, won an Academy Award for his very next script, Shakespeare In
Love? Nobody expects Oscar-worthy
performances in a movie like Cutthroat Island, but
the performances here are so wooden, it's as if the entire cast is reading
their lines phonetically.
I was tempted
to write that the performances are uniformly wooden, but I always try to single
out moments of genius in even the most misbegotten boondoggles. So I'd like to
give Langella mad props for finding the perfect tone for his role, a slimy,
theatrical, lip-smacking old-school villain of the most reptilian sort. In the
climactic battle between Langella and Davis' ships, the old pro and venerable
heavy single-handedly lifts the whole enterprise out of the muck and into camp
heaven for at least a few glorious seconds when he raises his arms in joy and
shouts deliriously "I love this! I love it!" At least someone's enjoying
himself.
It's hard to
write about a pirate movie of relatively recent vintage without comparing it to Pirates Of The Caribbean, the movie that
resurrected the genre and inspired a resurgence of interest in all things
piratey. The genius of Johnny Depp's deliriously fun performance was that it
didn't just wink knowingly at the audience; it staggered up to the audience
with rum on its breath, drunkenly threw an arm over its shoulder, and slurred,
"I'm just having a laff here, you know? Just a bit of a giggle and a fat
paycheck before it's back to art movies and banging Vanessa Paradis." Depp
single-handedly transformed what could have been a clattering, soulless
contraption (it was a CGI-intensive blockbuster based on a goddamned theme park
ride, for Christ's sake) into an agreeably oddball romp through sheer force of
personality. That human element is fatally missing from Cutthroat
Island.
There's a hint
of that cheeky self-mockery in Modine's performance, and loads of it in
Langella's gleefully over-the-top turn. Yet Cutthroat Island cries out for a light touch that Davis and Harlin
fatally lack. They don't seem to understand that pirate movies should be fun,
not a grueling technical exercise. All those fancy helicopter shots, elaborate
stunts (many performed by Davis herself), and fussily choreographed swordfights
mean nothing if the characters are paper-thin, the plot convoluted, and the
one-liners groan-inducing.
Being a fan of
pirates and pirate movies (though not a fan of The Pirate Movie), I experienced a childlike surge of excitement over
the promise of swashbuckling adventures on the high seas, and all manner of
derring-do, during Cutthroat Island's
opening credits. Then the film began, and that excitement dissipated, never to
return. Cutthroat Island resurrects
the moribund pirate movie, just to bury it all over again. It runs the gamut from workmanlike to dull to egregiously
awful.
We may not have
seen the last of Cutthroat Island, however. According to my spies in the industry, the
studio was so disappointed in Harlin's big, dumb take on Cutthroat
Island that they recently hired Paul
Schrader to shoot an entirely different version of the film that is rumored to
be more cerebral and spiritual. Revenge is indeed a dish best served cold.
Failure, Fiasco, or Secret
Success: Failure
