Hudson Hawk
                                                                                                    
Director: Michael Lehmann
Year: 1991
Rating: 5.5
I have avoided this film for 35 years in the same way I avoid walking barefoot on broken glass. When it was released, it was a huge bomb at the box office and a favorite target of mean spirited critics. Considering that Bruce Willis was a major star after the first two Die Hard films, it is amazing that no one showed up for this other than homeless men who wanted a safe place to drink. But after taking out my kidney a few weeks ago and recovering slowly from the surgery, I figured this could not be worse than that. I may have been wrong.



All of the brickbats thrown at this preposterous cartoony film are well deserved. Tarred and feathered and run out of town in a wheelbarrow is understandable. Yet it has its charms amongst the rubble of an absurd plot, exaggerated acting and moments that land like a dead duck. First of all, it is a comedy; a playful mockery of all the tropes of an action heist film with twists spread around like rice at a wedding. Trouble is that it isn't funny nor meant to be but instead is absurdist like a Pinter play. It is in retrospect that you realize just how silly this is because your initial impulse is to take it at face value as a heist film. And as that, it is dreadful, filled with nonsensical coincidences and ridiculous side characters that are parodies of other film characters.



It begins with a five minute prologue that is set in da Vinci's time in which he is painting the Mona Lisa (she has a set of decaying teeth), has invented a flying machine and has alchemized lead into gold. Ok, the Mona Lisa smile should have tipped me off that this was a comedy, but it didn't really. The film jumps forward to the present time when primo cat burglar Hawk (Bruce Wills) is being released from prison and declaring that he is going straight. That doesn't last long as he and his partner (Danny Aiello) are blackmailed into a series of thefts of da Vinci creations by a coalition of the CIA (James Coburn), the Mafia (Frank Stallone) and a psycho husband-wife act (Richard Grant and Sandra Bernhard). In a page out of a da Vinci conspiracy novel, by assembling the hidden objects in the da Vinci artifacts they can recreate his alchemy machine and take over the world.



Sort of like Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, but sillier. The film was produced at the behest of Willis and by all accounts, he was an asshole during the shooting insisting on one close up after another in which he was either smirking or looking surprised. There has even been a book written about the making of the film and the chaos behind the camera. One plus is the lead actress had to drop out after she hurt he back and they brought on Andie MacDowell whose smile still makes my toes curl up. Her dolphin imitation squeals is one of the highlights of the film. None of it holds together thanks to the disarray of changing writers and a director (Michael Lehmann, Heathers) who had a very different vision of the film than the scriptwriter and producer. Then you had Willis bringing in his friends to be in the film so that the film has more villains than a Batman TV series. But a number of individual scenes like the chase on the bridge, the heist that they sing to and the finale work well.