A quarter-century after its release, CutThroat Island still holds a notorious place in filmic folklore. In inflation adjusted terms it’s the second biggest box office bomb of all time, just behind Mortal Engines (2018), and Patrick Malahide has the dubious distinction of being in both. The mid-1990s saw peculiar forces warring within Hollywood culture. Since the rise of television in the 1950s and the crumbling of the old studios amidst an age of failed epics in the 1960s, Hollywood had generally been fairly circumspect in how it spent money. But as the multiplex boom brought in the biggest audience numbers in decades, coupled with the victory of blockbuster thinking, splashier productions became more familiar, and with them big failures. The degree to which this has become normalised is quite telling: scan a list of the biggest flops, even accounting for inflation, and the vast bulk of them come from the last twenty years. CutThroat Island came out the same year as Waterworld, another aquatic action-adventure sporting a mismatch of star ambition and overblown production values, although that film at least managed to scrape its way towards profit. Around the same time, many people were also questioning, as strong and gritty female characters were becoming more common in the wake of Aliens (1986), if action heroines could become a proper thing. Some established female stars were willing to push in that direction, although most who tried, like Demi Moore and Geena Davis, crashed hard and heavy.
Renny Harlin, annointed as a major studio filmmaker thanks to directing Die Hard 2 (1990) and Cliffhanger (1993), took on CutThroat Island and convinced his bosses his new bride Davis could cut it as an action star. The film began life as a project Carolco honcho Mario Kassar urged into production without a proper script, because the faltering studio desperately needed a big hit, but Harlin gradually transformed it from a straightforward retro-style pirate movie to one that would be dominated by Davis. As ideas go that wasn’t necessarily a bad one, but hardly an obvious one either. Davis was still a fairly hot property after winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Accidental Tourist (1988) and starring in hits like Thelma & Louise (1991) and A League of Their Own (1992), but her cachet was more one of romance and tragicomedy, not gymnastic ass-kicking. Harlin and Kassar couldn’t obtain a big male star, with Michael Douglas dropping out as he felt Davis’ role was being expanded at the expense of his. Matthew Modine, who had been a somewhat undervalued and underexploited talent since Full Metal Jacket (1987), finally took the male lead. There was potential in the basic joke of making Davis the ferocious pirate chieftain and Modine the slick and witty trickster who’s also often the damsel in distress. And yet the stink of rot was already upon CutThroat Island even before shooting started, as Carolco filed for bankruptcy. Harlin paid for script rewrites out of his own pocket. Upon release, the movie brought in mostly ruthless reviews, and about a tenth of its budget. I recently revisited CutThroat Island in a spirit of curiosity: would it seem any better now than the lumbering mess I remembered?
Davis plays Morgan Adams, the daughter of pirate captain Black Harry Adams (Harris Yulin), who at the outset is captured and slain by his brother Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), leader of a rather more scurvy crew. Dawg wants to track down a horde of treasure their father secreted on the mysterious CutThroat Island, but the clues to its whereabouts were divided between his other three sons, one of whom Dawg has already killed. Before he expires, Black Harry tells Morgan to retrieve his portion of the map, tattooed on his scalp. Morgan and Dawg converge on the fourth brother, Mordechai (George Murcell), who runs a tavern and bawdyhouse. On the way Morgan buys the condemned thief, con artist, and general braggart William Shaw (Matthew Modine) as a slave, for she needs his skill in reading Latin and general sneaky stuff to translate the map’s convoluted instructions. Shaw manages to get hold of Mordechai’s map portion, complicating his already spiky relationship with Morgan, and after some of Morgan’s men mutiny they’re washed ashore on CutThroat Island, obliged to race against Dawg and the greedy, opportunistic English governor Ainslee (Malahide), who's gotten wind of this intrigue, to find the horde. Amongst the few supporting characters of note are John Reed (Maury Chaykin), a writer who’s been sailing with Morgan to research the pirating lifestyle, and Captain Trotter (Angus Wright), Ainslee’s subordinate, who finds himself half-heartedly trying to carry out his rotter boss’s commands.
That’s basically all the story there is, and even when CutThroat Island makes gestures towards complicating things, as when Ainslee bullies Reed into leading him to the island, the discursions play out without any twists or surprises. The film is vague and clumsy in explaining the background history of the central, twisted family, and there’s no punch to the climax where Dawg tries to convince Morgan to join him, a moment that constitutes just about the only flourish of proper character drama. The rest of the film takes the notion that pirate movies are supposed to be jolly, larkish spectacles so much to heart that it can’t slow down and deliver a believable interaction or motivation. Shaw is first glimpsed charming the pants and jewels off various homely ladies in a ballroom, but without the gift for visiting such delight to his marks that they forgive him as many a pirate and highwayman managed in pulp fiction lore, thus establishing Shaw as less charismatic rogue than asinine pig. Morgan is introduced post-coital with a cavalier who announces he slept with her to get a chance to arrest her, only for her to brandish the shot from his pistol and announcing, “I’ve got your balls.” A perfect encapsulation of the level of wit on hand, as well as a thumbnail reference for what goes wrong with a lot of would-be action heroines, turning them into a sort of emasculation fantasy. Morgan’s reasons for rescuing Shaw and then putting up with him are terribly thin, particularly when she lets him operate on her to remove a bullet despite suspecting smartly that he’s not, as he likes to pretend, a one-time medical student.
The film exists as a bunch of threadbare pretexts lurching from set-piece to set-piece, except that the set-pieces never seem to know quite what they’re accomplishing beyond showing off how much money they cost. Of course, a good action film never needs much excuse. But Harlin as a director never had any feel for what was too much, and lacked interest in storytelling as an end worthy in itself, and so CutThroat Island is something of a hymn to excess. Attempts to revive the pirate movie seemed to crop up every few years, many of them also poorly received and suffering from similarly wrongheaded precepts, including James Goldstone’s Swashbuckler (1976) and Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1984). Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) would finally score a hit where so many others failed, despite sharing many of the same problems. But certainly it succeeded through such touches as giving the mode a new lustre of the epic by introducing the supernatural, much as the Indiana Jones films had for the pulp adventurer mode, coupled with the clever if semi-accidental idea of letting Johnny Depp serve as one-man satire whilst making Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom play things straight, devices that let the filmmakers keep ways of approaching the material in balance. Whereas CutThroat Island isn't funny enough to cut it as a comedy and never locates real melodramatic juice either. Perhaps a better analogue is Martin Campbell’s The Mask of Zorro just two years later, which managed to swing just about everything CutThroat Island fumbles.
Nowadays some poor unfortunate culture writer might be obliged to cough up 500 words on how the film makes a point about female leadership, as Morgan faces revolt from her crew, resulting in her and other loyalists being marooned, and the disdainful possessiveness of her uncle who represents a kind of toxic version of patriarchal authority as opposed to Morgan’s lost, decent daddy. But the film is actually entirely uninterested in making anything of its gender flip precepts. Morgan might ironically have been a more engaging character if she was pitched as a darker, more fearsome figure struggling more with her identity, and Shaw was, like the damsels of yore, representative of different mores. Davis and Modine do their best to invest flat and poorly written characters with zest and specificity despite their lack of chemistry. Compared to, say, The Black Swan (1942), CutThroat Island is entirely clueless and tone-deaf as to how the pirate movie has long been rooted in metaphorical sexuality and gender contest. Langella and Malahide ultimately deliver more genuine entertainment value as very different men who nonetheless find accord as right down bastards who can scarcely be bothered with the niceties of the world about them – and by extension the idea of blockbuster cinema. Malahide wraps all his lines in such assiduous condescension he manages to make his bad lines sound like Oscar Wilde, and Langella gives a mostly well-judged turn of florid villainy, particularly when he tries mimicking aristocratic airs with a blend of aspiration and contempt.
Despite its deep lack of inspiration, its endemic witlessness, the trite and forced approximation of both old-school fun and liberated spunk in a paltry script, CutThroat Island nonetheless still managed to mildly surprise me upon revisiting. These days I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to just about anything that still bespeaks the love of physical craft in moviemaking free of post-production pizzazz and lazy digital augmentation. CutThroat Island certainly has that craftsmanship in spades, in many ways a last hurrah for filmmaking as D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, or David Selznick understood it. The few flourishes of CGI are still merely devices rather than the whole show – used to enhance an effect of Davis falling from a height, for instance. The scale of production, particularly in an early street chase and in the finale, has genuine and palpable scale, scale that Harlin, despite his many lacks, knew how to utilise. There’s such sweeping lustre to the backdrops and set-pieces that the film almost manages to carry your through with the sheer force of its cinematic largesse. Early on there’s a magnificent shot of Morgan riding to her father’s rescue along submerged sand banks, a visual that captures the essence of a romantic swashbuckler tradition. CutThroat Island so urgently wants to please it’s almost pathetic.
The expanses of extras and sets, ships and locales, give the feeling all that money spent at least ended up on screen, particularly once the film reaches the Thai locations standing in for the titular island. Harlin’s orchestration of stunt work sometimes pays off in terrific moments, particularly in an amazing shot where Davis seems to tumble head over heels from an open window to land in place on a carriage driver’s seat beside Modine. But the moments preceding this stunt, as Morgan is forced to jump up onto an enclosed balcony and charge through the interior, brushing aside shopping patrons, bespeaks Harlin’s less persuasive streak, retarding the impact through mismatching the necessary sense of physical prowess and pace and mixing in awkward humour, as if we’ve swerved momentarily into a Pink Panther movie. Another thing that can be said in CutThroat Island’s favour is that it actually and properly typifies the genre it set out to honour, down to the big battle between the rival pirate ships and crews, rather than trying to hype it with touches from other wings of pop culture.
Some beats, like members of the imperial ranks who finish up joining the pirates in a humorous twist, were later repeated virtually unchanged in Pirates of the Caribbean. But ultimately the mixture of bludgeoning heft in the filmmaking and the flimsiness of the dramatic elements keep CutThroat Island from being much of anything, even a guilty pleasure. It’s the sort of film you watch continually making mental notes how it could all have been better done. Harlin had great skill in shooting and cutting action, but few of the action scenes become properly exciting. Not just because it’s hard to sympathise much with the characters, but also because Harlin never seems certain how to build the sequences with an effective sense of interior logic and the compressed dramatic intensity expressed in physical ways that make a good action scene. Much like the film around them, the action scenes pile up elements because, well, that’s what you do. Harlin sends Morgan and Dawg up into the rigging as they duel purely because it looks cool, and Morgan isn’t even granted enough respect to find a way of outfighting her evil uncle.
Certainly the most excruciating flourish Harlin uses to patch over the problems with the film is the constant use of slow-motion to lend desperate hype to just about every supposedly thrilling leap and duck and gunshot. If all those shots were cut out the film would run about a third shorter. Today, well removed from its moment of infamy, CutThroat Island is allowed to be pleasantly mediocre, a mildly diverting matinee flick to be watched on some very slow Sunday afternoon. But it’s also even more clearly a wasted opportunity, and often devolves often into a stuttering, arrhythmic grabbag. Davis and Harlin moved on quickly to make The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), another heavy-handed if rather gamier attempt to present Davis as a badass, but Harlin would do better on Deep Blue Sea (1999), a rare moment where his cynicism and skill in showmanship would converge on the right venue.
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