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.
Combining high-adventure and greed, Cutthroat Island is meant to be a thrilling 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 after Michael Douglas 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 it’s a mess, and 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 least of Hollywood’s unsuccessful projects (including Polanski’s recent “Pirates”) to resurrect a genre that used to be popular in the old days.
This year seems to have reinvented the swashbuckling action 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 on any level.
The movie had a notoriously troubled and chaotic production involving multiple rewrites and recasts.
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 adjusted for inflation.
It is listed in the Guinness World Records as the biggest box-office bomb of all time, and imapcted the bankability and production of pirate-themed films until Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, in 2003, with Johnny Depp.
Its failure caused the closing of 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.