In my essay on the Bruce Willis / Billy Bob Thorton vehicle Bandits, I observed how the cast seemed to be having a great time on screen, though I felt they sometimes might have forgotten there was an audience they were supposed be appeasing. Willis is the star of 1991’s Hudson Hawk, a much-derided vanity picture and pet project of the actor. Here, he and several other actors who should know better act like they’re having a great time, consideration for the audience be damned. Except this time, I doubt even the actors were really enjoying themselves.
Not that they don’t go to great pains to pretend otherwise. Willis cracks wise as the titular cat burglar, hewing more closely to his shtick on Moonlighting than the greater nuance he had shown in the first Diehard. Danny Aiello is his partner-in-crime, with whom Willis also shares joint ownership of a bar and restaurant. Largely, this duo will be best remembered here for the worst element of the production: that being the song and dance numbers they do while performing heists. Yes, this is somehow even worse than Andie MacDowell playing a Vatican nun who goes undercover to seduce Willis and ends up bound to a chair while making dolphin noises. I wish I was making this up.
This kind of insanity could have been quite funny and maybe even more relevant today, given how much of contemporary humor is deep weirdness that doesn’t always scan to me as intentional comedy. Alas, it even fails when viewed from the perspective of the modern viewer.
It doesn’t help that the film has a great many elements binding it to the era in which it was made, so strongly it may be locked to one specific month of its lengthy production schedule. For example, many here remark that Willis, who was apparently in prison for most of the 80’s, is unaware of the Nintendo. It is apparent he still doesn’t know in the picture’s final few minutes, as he asks MacDowell, in an apparent double-entendre, whether she wants to play Nintendo with him. Then there’s the hoodlums played by Frank Stallone and two others, who are collectively known as the Mario Brothers. This is a pointless pop culture reference masquerading as a joke.
Other pop culture from earlier eras obviously influenced the style of this film Willis is frequently clad in a long black coat and a stupid looking hat which brought to my mind something from the era of The Bowery Boys, though not any one comic in particular. This rather hard R movie jarringly has moments of slapstick reminiscent of The Three Stooges interspersed with gruesome moments like a guy with arrows in his chest fall to the ground hard enough to make those arrows pop out his back. Inexplicably, William Conrad was hired to do the narration solely because he provided the same service for the old Rocky & Bullwinkle show, a connection I doubt anybody would make unless they listened to the director’s commentary, as I did.
Then there’s the old American Songbook standards Willis and Aiello sing in lieu of using conventional timing devices in their heists. This is a grating and pointless affectation, and the number chosen is based solely upon its duration. Willis seems to know the length of every song, an odd ability which seems to speak less to his appreciation of music and more to his ability to memorize statistics. Perhaps it is this curious relationship to music which led Motown to make the baffling decision to release an album by him. If 1987’s The Return of Bruno isn’t the weirdest, and possibly worst, title released by the label, then the mind boggles at what might surpass it.
I will concede that vanity album was likely a passion project for Willis, and I have no doubt this was as well. Unfortunately, again like that album, this picture reeks of a ego run amok with nobody willing to speak up with a dissenting voice. To be sure, he was smug and perpetually smirking on Moonlighting, but he was also charming. The latter is what is missing in Hawk. In such films as Diehard, he had a memorable catchphrase for all occasions, especially when he had just offed a bad guy. Here, he inexplicably says deeply unfunny dreck like “slurp my butt”, “1-800-I’m-gonna-fucking-die” and “What do you say now, centrally intelligent scumsicle?” He sarcastically laments he doesn’t get to do community service, as he was “looking forward to teaching handicapped kids how to yodel.” You may have noticed none of these lines, nor any other from the film, have been widely seen on T-shirts then or now.
Even his defining characteristic irritated me, and that is his desire for nothing more than a cappuccino. I understand he gag is his increasing frustration as every attempt to simply enjoy a cup is disrupted in different ways each time. But this doesn’t make for a solid recurring joke. Instead, it feels like I am really seeing a spoiled celebrity angry that he cannot get his perfectly prepared cappuccino. The very end of the film has him finally downing a cup of it, only to flippantly toss the ceramic cup over his shoulder. I can’t fully articulate why I feel this way, but I believe this moment perfectly encapsulates the movie into a single freeze-frame. Maybe I just associate the pointless tossing of breakable cup to the toss-off feeling of this very expensive production.
Of the cast, villains played by Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard seem to be the only ones who really know what type of picture they’re in. Both are given free reign to go as over-the-top as they wish. I never thought I would say this about either actor, but the director should have reigned them in a bit. That said, Grant comes close to channeling Withnail, his greatest role, when he relishes the line “I’ll torture you so slowly, you’ll think it’s a career.”
There are several other nefarious characters about, most notably a group of oddball CIA agents, each of whom is named after a candy bar. Many are eating their namesake candy when we first see them, as if that is all they every consume. Most memorable of these is a pre-NYPD-Blue David Caruso as the mute Kit Kat, who goes around impersonating the other characters for no apparent reason. If you ever wanted to see him in a dress and impersonating MacDowell, here’s your chance. Another of his shticks is the business cards he dispenses in lieu of dialogue, and I was amused by the one he gives Willis on their first meeting “My name is Kit Kat. This is not a dream.” As for myself, I was wondering if the agents chose their own identities. It would probably be my luck I could be dubbed Licorice, as I hate the stuff. The boss of this collective is James Coburn, who laments to Willis and Aiello his inability to come up with repartee on par with their own. Yeah, it must be challenging to adlib such material as this line Willis says to twin agents: “What do they call you guys, Igg and Ook?” Show me somebody who finds this funny. I don’t even think it is a cultural reference from any era.
What is strange is not even the heist sequences are enjoyable, and I do love heist pictures. It isn’t just the annoying song and dance bit, as that doesn’t even factor into a caper Willis performs on his own in the Vatican. Instead, it is the generally haphazard nature of them and the complete lack of feeling there are any stakes. Also, I didn’t believe any of the elements of these thefts, especially how Willis disables lasers in that Vatican job. He uses mirrors which, even if positioned at an exact 90-degree angle to the beams, would have simply reflected the laser light back into the source and the sensors presumably on the opposite side would have gone off because of the interruption of the beam. Still, I will concede I like how he tests another security measure there by tossing a girl’s stuffed animal at a case just to see what happens.
Much of what I learned about the film I only knew because I watched it with the commentary track. One thing I was most stunned to learn is there are a couple of references to North by Northwest, as if this picture could possibly be worthy of paying tribute to it. Then there is this informative little tidbit which enlightened me in no way whatsoever: “Something About Mary was not the first film with a dog catapulted out a window.” Most shocking is the director, Michael Lehmann, had previously helmed the classic black comedy Heathers. At one point in his commentary track here, he says, “How can you not tell we’re making a comedy here?” Given the guy’s previous work, I’m amazed he feels he has to ask. I’d say the complete absence of laughs led me to conclude this isn’t a comedy.
I get how Hudson Hawk is supposed to be parody of action and heist pictures. I mean, it is impossible to take seriously such an obviously farcical line as this, when a character is surprised another wasn’t killed: “You were supposed to be blown up into fiery chunks of flesh!” But it still fails as a comedy, as well as an action film. Oh, and the objective of everybody here is to find and assemble the pieces of a device created by DaVinci to turn lead into gold, so there’s globe-trotting to find the pieces and analyzing old documents, and blah blah blah. The movie’s greatest offense isn’t failing on its own terms, but failing to serve as a warning to prevent a couple of decades of shit like National Treasure and The DaVinci Code that engage in the same kind of quasi-edutainment bullshit.
Dir: Michael Lehmann
Starring Bruce Willis, Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray