Cutthroat Island (1995)

Lady pirate (it says so on her wanted poster) Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) is having a bit of a hard yet adventurous time. Her (gentleman?) pirate captain father is murdered by his own brother, notoriously sadistic (so definitely non-gentleman) pirate Dawg Brown (Frank Langella, not Christopher Lloyd), and dies in her arms. Dear Dad has left Morgan something rather interesting, though, one of three parts of a treasure map leading to untold riches tattooed right onto his head. The two other parts are in the hands of daddy’s brothers, so Morgan will have to fight Dawg rather sooner than later, if she wants to acquire the treasure as well as her vengeance, that is.

Other problems coming up are her decided lack of reading and specifically Latin – solved by stealing the obligatory charming rogue (Matthew Modine) out of slavery – as well as a rather mutinous crew, a corrupt governor and his troops, betrayal, and all the special dangers of your typical treasure island.

Married couple Renny Harlin and Geena Davis were not terribly lucky when it came to get their own production firm up and running, losing quite a bit of money in the endeavour of DeLaurentiis style hubris at hand. Despite the critical drubbings it received beside the commercial one, I actually rather like Cutthroat Island, at least looked at from today’s perspective. It’s a bit of a curious film, trying to tell a swashbuckler style tale not with the flash and elegance of the swashbuckler but in the language Harlin as a director spoke best, that of 90s excessive mainstream action movies, a genre nobody ever confused as being elegant; and all the flash it has, it gets out of explosions and the sort of loudness one can find obnoxious.

So historically minded mainstream film critics were bound to dislike the movie automatically, for the class is and was as a rule unable to resist the opportunity to write about how a film doesn’t live up to the one they had in their heads beforehand instead of meeting it on its own territory.

And sure, as a swashbuckler, the film isn’t terribly good, what with its general lack of swashbuckling – even the fencing and the swinging on candelabras has the heft and the bombast of  90s action movies and never suggests anything Errol Flynn might have been involved with – the only intermittently witty writing, and Harlin’s love for explosions.

However, watching it as a mid 90’s Harlin movie (what’s more US mainstream action than that?), I found myself enjoying the film quite a bit. Like Harlin, I rather like explosions, particularly ones shot as enthusiastically as the ones in this film, and I have a lot of time for the way Cutthroat Island takes the elements of the classic swashbuckler and turns them into a loud and a bit crass 90s action movie spectacle, or really, a series of spectacles, because the film would really rather like its audience not to catch a breath and think about anything of the beautiful nonsense going on.

Also like Harlin (I very much hope), I have a very soft spot for Geena Davis’s short phase as an action heroine. She might not be the physically most convincing female badass but makes up for that with throwing herself (and her stunt double) into the action scenes, the one-liners (horrible highlight is certainly “Bad dawg!”), and the swagger. And oh, does she swagger. Plus, in the mid-90s, mainstream cinema had even fewer female action heroines than there are today, so simply watching her beat up men, and do the Die Hard thing of getting ever bloodier and bloodied yet still coming out on top in her fights in the end, would be pretty enjoyable in itself, even if the film’s very diverse series of action sequences were less fun. Modine as the male romantic lead does stuff, too, but this is really Davis’s show, and he’s the support. And isn’t that just lovely, too?


Of course, it would have been nice if the film had found a bit more time to flesh out its characters beyond one character trait (though Langella does his one character trait as fantastic as Davis hers, so there’s that), or get up to a more convincing romance, but then, these aren’t really things big loud US action movies were made for, so I’m fine with the situation.