Cutthroat Island (Renny Harlin) 1995

Production Budget: $98 million
Worldwide Gross: $10 million
Subsequent Earnings: ???

Why didn’t Waterworld win many Razzie awards?  It’s because it had stiff competition from Showgirls (no pun intended) and Cutthroat Island.  Plot summary from Wikipedia:

Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) and her learned slave, William Shaw (Matthew Modine), are on a quest to recover the three portions of a treasure map. The treasure is hidden on a mysterious Cutthroat island. Unfortunately, the final portion is held by her villainous uncle, Dawg Brown (Frank Langella). Her crew is skeptical of her leadership abilities, so she must complete her quest before they mutiny against her. This is made more difficult by the efforts of the British Royal Navy from Jamaica to end her piratical career. On her ship, Morning Star, Morgan starts the voyage to Cutthroat island.

It seems that the producers were trying to make an Errol Flynn like swashbuckling adventure.  The two leads make anyone scratch their heads.  Gina Davis and Matthew Modine?  Was Thelma & Louise that successful that they thought Davis could carry a multi-million dollar pirate epic?  Davis’ part was made much larger though when they couldn’t find a suitable male lead.  They offered Michael Douglas $15 million for the lead role but he refused.  Then they offered the movie to Keanu Reeves, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day Lewis (can you picture that?), Jeff Bridges, Michael Keaton, Charlie Sheen, Liam Neeson, and Tim Robbins (again, can you picture that?).  Then they finally offered the movie to Matthew Modine.  Congratulations Matthew, you were only the tenth person they considered for the role.  You only slightly beat out David Hasselhoff.  I was surprised they didn’t offer Stallone the role frankly.  Frank Stallone that is.

Anyway, the movie was a money pit as they had to spend more and more to create the pirate ships, shoot large action sequences, and film in exotic locations.  Nobody saw the movie because and they all said “Gina Davis and Matthew Modine!?  Why didn’t they just get Frank Stallone” when they saw the trailer.  “Cutthroat Island is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest loss of money for a film company ever.” (IMDb)  This and Showgirls (both released the same year) effectively bankrupted Carolco.

Is it any good?  No.  There is already a great rant on this movie, and I will not attempt to try to beat that.  Like other bombs reviewed here, you might watch it for MST3K purposes.  Other than that, the movie is no good.

Revisit

Holy crap I forgot how much I hate this movie.  This is a fun swashbuckling action film with all the joy surgically removed and replaced with pure anguish.  I’ve seriously done like three reviews in the meantime since watching this again because I really don’t even want to think about it.  I really sometimes hate critically analyzing a movie and thinking about the best way to say a movie slurps donkey dick.

I suppose I’ll launch into my biggest gripe which is both the main character Morgan and the casting of Geena Davis.  Geena Davis is terrible in this movie.  For one she seems to have lost the ability to act.  Her accent is worse than Michael Madsen trying for a Brit accent in Bloodrayne.  She DOES NOT use contractions and, speaks, with strange emPHASis on words and odd…pauses in speaking.  Also she has the complete wrong look for this movie.  Usually in action movies with female protagonists, the women are in shape for the stunts.  In Cutthroat Island Davis is sluggish on the fight scenes and has all the dexterity of John Goodman trying to clear a hurdle.  It is also odd that everyone remarks that Morgan is so physically attractive, yet that is so hard to believe with her mannish face complete with sunburn and covered with more bruises than Rocky Balboa.  But even if you had a great actress, the character of Morgan is terrible.  She is an idiot.  Morgan is out planned and out maneuvered at every turn and she can’t fight at all.  Her plans are sniffed out immediately by her superior antagonist, she is captured or caught off guard numerous times, and she is oblivious of the people who mean to betray her.  Morgan is also incredibly inept at social skills.  Her crew doesn’t believe in her skills as a captain and instead of convincing them of her skills she basically says “I’ll kick anyone’s ass in this room!”  Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence; does it?  It really doesn’t help she is not charming when she does some rather morally questionable decisions.  Jack Sparrow was an absolute deviant but at least he was a laugh.  Here Morgan is willing to murder Shaw and instead of feeling justified, the audience feels disgusted at her actions.  Morgan is supposed to carry this movie but in reality she is the rotting carcass of the albatross that is around its neck.

The rest of the supporting cast doesn’t fare much better.  Matthew Modine tries to be the quick talking Han Solo (I guess) rogue but it really doesn’t work out that way.  Instead of being a thief with the golden tongue who can talk people into anything, we get the pirate version of Leo Getz.  He just won’t shut the fuck up and none of his dialog is charming in the slightest.  Frank Langella is the villain and what is truly shocking is they really don’t use him.  This guy can be a great campy villain, and while he gets a few good lines here and there, he is wasted for the majority of the movie.  How do you fail to use Skelator for gods sake?

The story is one big blob of generic mush.  There are three parts to a map our heroes have to find and then they have to find Cutthroat island.  It is a repetitive effort of go here, have lame fight scene, try to get a map piece, go there, have another lame action scene, lather, rinse, repeat.  We get a surprising plot twist when a crew member we know nothing about and have no investment in sells out Morgan to the authorities.  Oh wait, its not surprising cause I don’t care about anyone.  The action scenes are not any good either.  As I mentioned before, Davis can’t handle any of the stunts which sucks because it is all supposed to be about how badass she is.  The rest is an a mind numbing amount of cannons being fired and random barrels being blown up.

A special honorable mention of shittiness has to go to the musical score.  This music is so bombastic and overbearing its like it grabs you by the hair and smashes your face against the counter top repeatedly until your head is a puddle of red goo.  This soundtrack never shuts up and is always cranked to 11.  It is one of the most annoying things in this movie.

So yeah, I never want to see this movie again.  I never wanted to see it a second time.  This bomb deserved everything it got and I would even say Carolco deserved to go under for greenlighting this piece of shit.