Husband-and-wives teams are not new in the film world, but few have worked with the highly publicized harmony and press coverage of director Renny Harlin and star Geena Davis; Geena reportedly blew hot kisses to her beau on the set. Romance aside, the movie has been pushed back a number of times, usually a very bad sign in Hollywood.
Cutthroat Island is meant to be a thrilling high-adventure tale of pirates.
Geena Davis stars as a feisty maiden, who gets involved with a dashing gambler, played by a miscast Matthew Modine, who took over the role after Michael Douglas had smartly dropped out.
In 1668 Jamaica, having escaped failed honey trap sting operation, Morgan Adams hunts down her uncle and fellow pirate, Dawg Brown, who has captured her father, Black Harry.
Black Harry has one of three pieces of a map to huge stash of gold on the remote Cutthroat Island. Dawg has another piece, having stolen it from the corpse of a third brother, Richard, while a fourth brother, Mordechai, has the last piece. Harry refuses to give Dawg his piece and escapes with Morgan’s help, but not before being mortally wounded. A dying Harry reveals to his daughter the location of the map piece: on his scalp.
Structurally, the picture is a mess, and, furthermore, it feels like it was tempered with in post-production. Not that it matters much, but the story is incoherent, and scene after scene fall flat.
Add this picture to the latest of Hollywood’s unsuccessful projects (including Polanski’s Pirates) to resurrect a genre that used to be popular in the old days.
This year seems to have reinvented the swashbuckling epic actioner genre with a vengeance. But, alas, as mediocre as Liam Neeson’s Rob Roy, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, and Richard Gere’s First Knight were, there is no comparison to Cutthroat Island, which is a misfire, from start to finish, on any level.
The movie had a notoriously long, troubled and chaotic production involving multiple rewrites, recasts, and reshoots.
Critical reactions, where the script was the focus of criticism, were generally negative.
It was one of the biggest box office bombs in history, with losses of $147 million when the budget is adjusted for inflation.
Cutthroat Island is currently enlisted in the Guinness World Records as the biggest box-office bomb of all timw.
It had negatively imapcted the bankability and production of pirate-themed films, which woukd last until Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, in 2003, with Johnny Depp which would become a popular franchise).
Its disastrous failure was reportedly the main cause fir the closing of the studio Carolco Pictures.
I have no doubts that Cutthroat Island will end up on many Ten Worst Films lists of 1995; perhaps of the entire decade.
