Cutthroat Island

Year: 1995 (USA)
Genre: Action/Sea Adventure
Directed: Renny Harlin
Stars: Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, Frank Langella, Maury Chaykin, Patick Malahide, Stan Shaw, Rex Linn, Paul Dillon, Christopher Masterson
Production: MGM

From the director of Die Hard 2 (1990) and the collective pens of six screenplay writers comes Cutthroat Island (1995) the brazenly cheesy pirate saga of ill repute. Starring Oscar winner Geena Davis, Oscar nominated Frank Langella and…umm…Matthew Modine, Cutthroat Island is the tall tale of a female pirate captain (Geena Davis) attempting to find the fabled titular island before her heinous uncle (also a pirate captain and also Frank Langella) does. The key to her triumph; a con artist named Shaw (Modine) who knows Latin and can translate the map.

This movie is about as boilerplate as one can get. The characters are one dimensional, the dialogue is stilted, the special effects; a masterwork in bombastic nineties ridiculousness. Yet there’s something near-magical about this particular train wreck. Nearly every scene has explosions and sword fighting mayhem all of which are well choreographed if sloppily done.

Arrrrrrrrr!

Geena Davis tries her absolute hardest to pull off her Captain Morgan (yes her name is Captain Morgan), and lord knows her 6 foot frame would have made her an obvious choice for a hard fighting buccaneer. I commend her on the physicality she brings to the role managing to get punched in the face and break through candy glass unfazed. But her elegance and beauty betray her. Her smiles are always genuine and her body language is always feminine; maybe the demeanor of a bourgeois suffragette or a semi-professional female baseball player but not that of a bloodthirsty rogue pirate.

Most of the blame for this film’s so-bad-it’s-good quality lies squarely with the director Renny Harlin who also directed the recent clunker The Legend of Hercules (2014). Harlin comes from the school of grandiose action films before CGI. Like Guy Hamilton and John McTiernan before him, swift, consistent flow of action takes precedence over story, human characters and all the other little things that don’t matter. They accomplish this with elaborate set pieces, daring stunt work and, as mentioned before, lots and lots of explosions. Unlike Hamilton and McTiernan, Harlin has no artistic instinct behind the camera. The cinematography is grimy and brown and the set, while expensive looking is nevertheless noticeably fake. It’s as if Harlin wanted to update the swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks yet didn’t bother to update anything except for the actors.

Then again maybe this guy didn't do that good of a job either

Then there’s the writing which is borderline absurd. What passes for witty one-liners, are groan worthy puns and non-sequiturs with little bearing on anything of consequence. Everything else is exposition. It’s as if the six writers of the film all hated each other, were trapped in a room together, unable to leave until they came up with something and poised to be overly critical of everything the other said and did. What’s left is a script with no creativity or panache. In being so bland the authors of this rubbish commit a cardinal sin of writing: letting the audience notice the exposed frame of the writing instead of the action on the screen.

Yet, at the end of the day, Cutthroat Island is too harebrained to be taken seriously. If you go in with low expectation and a tendency to not take yourself or your films seriously, you might come out of a viewing on top. There is intrinsic value in watching a movie like Cutthroat Island, especially if you plan on going into a career in film. Movies like this serve to make you acutely aware of what not to do.

Final Grade: F