Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This month, we’re looking at Hudson Hawk, winner of three Razzies and baffler of the moviegoing public.
The last time Bruce Willis landed in our bucket during Raspberry Picking, he was a peripheral player, a pawn in the battle of wills between director and producer. This time, he gets to be the main character.
In the early 1980s, Bruce Willis had one lofty goal: he wanted to play James Bond.
It was a very lofty goal, and Willis had a few minor obstacles in his way. For one thing, he was American. For another thing, the only major role he’d had was as the supporting lead in a TV detective series called Moonlighting. Nobody was going to take him seriously as a new generation’s spy franchise star. The dream would have to remain a dream.
But then the late 1980s came around, and Willis had become a superstar. Moonlighting was a worldwide success, and the one-two box-office-flattening punch of Die Hard and Look Who’s Talking meant that big movie studios were tripping over each other in efforts to get him into their films. Bruce Willis could officially have anything he wanted. And he wanted to make a movie that he and his friend Robert Kraft had been developing, about a wisecracking cat-burglar from New Jersey named “Hudson Hawk.” They had even written a song.
If your goal is to be everyone’s good guy, maybe don’t use Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers as your inspiration?
Joel Silver, producer of Die Hards 1 and 2, figured he had another huge hit on the way and dutifully set about puking money – $70 million, eventually – in Willis’s direction. They offered Die Hard director John McTiernan the chair again, but he turned it down; instead, they brought in the young indie darling director-writer team of Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters for their big studio debuts.It will surprise no one who has followed the stories here at Raspberry Picking that problems began almost immediately. The sheer quantity of those problems, however, should raise even the most cynical eyebrows. Willis and Silver disagreed on whether Hudson Hawk should be a straight Die Hard-style action film (Silver’s preference) or a silly send-up of Die Hard-style action films (Willis’s vision). Rather than reach an agreement or part ways, the two took set about reenacting a long and wasteful version of the Sleeping Beauty pink versus blue fight, alternatively fighting whichever writer the other had just hired and sneakily bringing in a new one more to their liking. They eventually settled on Steven E. d’Souza (also of Club Die Hard) to pick up the pieces of the script Waters had begun, but even after d’Souza was brought aboard, rewrites of key scenes were demanded on a more or less daily basis.
Then there was the matter of the leading lady, an Italian nun who works for the Vatican. First came bona fide Italian Isabella Rosselini, who would eventually work with Willis on Death Becomes Her, but had to drop out of Hudson Hawk because of the scheduling delays caused by the neverending rounds of writer whack-a-mole. French actress Maruschka Detmers replaced her; Detmers then had to bow out after one day of shooting due to a pregnancy-induced spine injury. She was replaced by the distinctly non-European Andie MacDowell, who landed in her new role so fast that she didn’t have time to learn her character’s accent.
Weird kissy faces and dolphin noises were more important.
Finally, there was Willis’s lead-handed interference in the production. A passion project must allow for a certain amount of, well, passion on the part of its primary driver, but Willis drove everyone on set bonkers with demands for new scenes, rewrites, reshoots, expensive set pieces, and more rewrites. No one has ever denied reports that Hudson Hawk went through 80 drafts. In his memoir, Richard E. Grant referred to his time shooting Hudson Hawk as “a one-way ticket out of my mind.” And poor Michael Lehmann learned the hard way what being a director at a big studio was like, as he received sheaves of conflicting notes from the studio, the producers, and Willis as to the vision of the movie. When the movie went down the critical and commercial toilet upon its domestic release, Willis and Silver agreed to maintain their working relationship and blame Lehmann, who spent the next several years mostly in director jail, for the film’s failure.
But Hudson Hawk celebrated its 30th birthday not too long ago, and that means it’s due for an obligatory retrospective. The film has its share of appreciators (most of its creative team notably not among them), and some prominent film critics have begun to wonder if we all misjudged the movie upon its release, if we didn’t get it, if we didn’t like it because we had been expecting something else, etc. So let’s decide here. Was contemporary opinion unfair to Hudson Hawk?
THE STORY
When Hudson Hawk began, until I saw the opening titles, I was briefly convinced I’d rented the wrong movie by mistake.
No one told me this was a Dan Brown adaptation.
We open in the 15th century, where Bruce Willis is nowhere in sight, and Leonardo da Vinci (Jason Mantzoukas) (yes, really) (not really – Stefano Molinari – the Internet is full of lies, it turns out) is building a machine that can turn lead into gold. The machine is powered by the three parts of the Triforce – I mean, a nondescript spiky crystal, without which it will malfunction and explode.
Cut to the future, where Eddie “Hudson Hawk” Hawkins, a master cat burglar and safe cracker, has just finished a stint in Sing-Sing and is looking forward to retiring from his life of crime. He just wants to hang out at the bar with his old partner Tommy “Five-Tone” Messina (Danny Aiello) and enjoy a cappuccino. But before Hawk even steps out into the world as a free man, someone – specifically his new parole officer (Burtt Harris) – is trying to sign him up for a new heist. A whole bunch of people are dead-set on Hawk burgling an art auction house, where the maquette for da Vinci’s unfinished “Sforza” horse sculpture is about to be auctioned off. Hawk and Five-Tone, by the way, have an unusual way of coordinating heists: they synchronize their movements precisely based on the runtimes of different golden oldies, and they sing them together to ensure correct timing. This only makes a lick of sense if you can see it, and then no more than a lick.
Hawk and Five-Tone pull off the heist, but they’re not done! Of course they’re not! The brains behind this operation, billionaire vague industrialist weirdos Darwin and Minerva Mayflower (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard), need him to steal two more priceless da Vinci artifacts that contain fragments of the alchemy crystal, because they need to reconstruct the Gold Machine for an economic scheme that would make Rothbard, Hayek, Keynes, and Marx all weep together in confusion and dismay. So of course, Hawk needs to stop them and save the world from their harebrained scheming.
Also involved are George Kaplan (James Coburn), the head of the CIA, who is here to make me wonder why I’m not watching North by Northwest, and a team of agents codenamed after candy bars – Snickers (Don Harvey), Kit Kat (David Caruso), Almond Joy (Lorraine Toussaint), and Butterfinger (Andrew Bryniarski) – who are here to demonstrate what the CIA would be like if it were run by World Wrestling Entertainment. And lurking in the background is Sister Anna Baragli, an operative for the Vatican version of the CIA, who is possibly here to help Hawk or foil him depending on the needs of the particular scene they are in.
Check out that pre-Starbucks coffee machine!
THE BAD
Hudson Hawk is structured essentially as a Leslie Nielsen-esque slapstick comedy. On its way to being that, it runs into two insurmountable problems.
The first, naturally, is the script. Any script that went through (allegedly) eighty rewrites was going to be a hash, but incoherence is the least of Hudson Hawk’s writing problems. In a modern slapstick comedy, in between wacky physical hijinks, characters will sometimes open their mouths and words will come out. Ideally, these words will make the audience laugh, due to a combination of clever joke-writing and strong delivery. But the moments in Hudson Hawk where funny dialogue is clearly supposed to be occurring, characters instead emit some of the most bizarre sentences ever constructed in the English language. You’ll be sitting there, enjoying yourself, cruising along through some light hijinks with the characters, and then Bruce Willis will say something like “I want to teach the handicapped how to yodel.”
My face after every third line of dialogue.
Here are some other lines – real lines, just like that one – that made it into the final, seventy- or eighty-somethingth version of the screenplay for Hudson Hawk:
HAWK: If the Mario brothers weren’t New York’s third-largest crime family, I would say “kiss my ass.” But considering your status, I will say “slurp my butt.”
DARWIN MAYFLOWER: Outbid by my own wench! Quelle bummere!
GEORGE KAPLAN: They’re punks. They think the Bay of Pigs is an herbal tea and the Cold War has something to do with penguins.
“ALMOND JOY”: It’s better than when we first started out. Our code names were diseases. Can you imagine being called Chlamydia for a year?
DARWIN MAYFLOWER: Yes! If da Vinci were alive today, he’d be eating microwaved sushi, naked in the back of a Cadillac, with the both of us! The project of his life is now the TOYYY OF MIIINE!
DARWIN MAYFLOWER: The last ingredient in the recipe is da Vinci’s model of a helicopter…
MINERVA MAYFLOWER: …on display in the Loov-ruh in Paris for three days!
HAWK: As opposed to the Loov-ruh in Wisconsin?
(okay, that one actually made me giggle)
MINERVA MAYFLOWER, OVER AND BLOODY OVER, TO HER DOG: Bunny! Ball-ball!
If you want context, watch the movie your damn self.
The second insurmountable problem is the cast, who are acting in about seventeen different movies, only some of which are slapstick comedies. James Coburn is gamely playing a poor man’s Leslie Nielsen; his henchpersons are playing knockoffs of Kevin Smith characters. Frank Stallone and Carmine Zozzora think they’re in The Godfather. MacDowell – God bless her, she’s doing her best, but every time she pipes up in her South Carolina accent, it’s like an orchestra soloist going out of tune. It’s not her fault, but that doesn’t make it less hideously distracting. On the other hand, she has more inherent talent for the demands of slapstick than anyone else in the movie. And on the other other hand, she is forced by the nonsense demands of the script – the Mayflower Brigade have drugged her, but now they’re interrogating her and apparently expecting coherent answers – to chitter like a dolphin in a scene that comes very, very close to chucking the movie’s watchability into a woodchipper.
Speaking of the Mayflowers, Hudson Hawk lore holds that Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard developed an on-set friendship that kept them both sane and that lasts to this day. Truly, I am happy for them. I’m glad to know something good and genuine came out of their onscreen dynamic, because both of them are just unbelievably awful. Grant’s mouth-foaming performance suggests that a man with a gun is just off camera, ready to shoot if he dials back even for a second; he’s hamming it up, but under what looks like extreme duress. Bernhard, in the meantime, keeps doing the most upsetting things with her face, and all her lines sound like she’s chewing them and spitting them out instead of speaking them. Every time she snarls “BUNNNNEEE, BAWL-BAWL,” it’s like a tiny electric shock to the brain.
No! I promise I’ll bug my eyes some more! Just don’t rewrite the script again!
Oh, and that theme song Willis was so excited about? I couldn’t tell you a word or sing you a note of it.
THE GOOD
So Hudson Hawk is never clever and rarely funny. But you know what else it’s not? Boring.
You know those roller coasters that, instead of taking you up a lift hill, settle you down in your seat and then just shoot you down the track at upwards of 100 miles per hour? Hudson Hawk moves like one of those. Once the da Vinci prologue is over, it hurtles along at a near-constant, face-melting speed. Stuff happens constantly in this movie, and the audience is never permitted any processing time, aided by the herky-jerky editing of Chris Lebenzon and Michael Tronick. Bruce Willis will be punching syringes into a guy’s face one second, flying down a highway on a runaway ambulance gurney the next, and calmly chatting up this movie’s Bizarro World version of the CIA before another minute has passed. Your only option is to keep your head back and hold on. And after Catwoman, which caused the earth to slow down on its axis, it’s downright exhilarating.
Please keep your hands and arms inside the handcuffs.
Like the best of those roller coasters, it’s also pretty fun! Look, I believe that Bruce Willis was a miserable tyrant to work with on this movie, but Hudson Hawk for him is like a playground that he wanted to design especially for himself. He believes with all his heart that this is the role he was born to play. It’s…not…but seriously, who cares? He’s not a great comic actor, but he’s having a really, really good time, and you have to be at least a little happy for him after he spent so much of his star power getting the dad-ratted thing made.
Willis also – color me genuinely shocked – possesses a not-half-bad set of pipes. I wouldn’t pay to see him in concert, but he and Aiello are best in the film when they’re performing complex robberies as the world’s weirdest vaudeville act. “Swingin’ on a Star” has never seen better use. Lehmann and Silver both used a lot of their pull on the film to reign in Willis’s musical instincts, and that’s a crying shame. I would have doubtlessly enjoyed the film more if it had included a rousing duo rendition of “Mack the Knife” rather than just a passing mention of it.
Fit as a fiddle and ready for love, I could jump over the moon up above…
You’ll hear some viewers – not many, but some – claim that Hudson Hawk is some misunderstood comedic masterpiece and that people crapped all over it upon its release because they expected something different. Will I go that far? Not even close. The movie’s a battered, bruised crash test dummy being held together by Bruce Willis’s boyish glee and the grace of God. At the same time, I can’t be too down on it, because it’s weird and exciting and unapologetic and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The world would be a better place if all half-cocked vanity projects were so damn proud of what they are.
Quality of Movie: 2.5 / 5. I gave it 3 / 5 on Letterboxd for being compulsively watchable, but a lot of that watchability comes from incompetence.
Quality of Experience: 3.5 / 5. On the other hand, so compulsively watchable.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.