Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I don’t know much more about this than that it’s an infamous, ill-advised flop. I think it’s some kind of throwback to noir or heist movies, but it (the movie) went wrong. All I know for sure is that this is really not what people wanted to see from Bruce Willis.

After watching the movie:

Eddie “Hudson Hawk” Hawkins is the best cat burglar on at least one continent, just finished a very long prison sentence and just wants to get a good cup of coffee and rebuild his life as an honest man. Hawk isn’t even out of the prison yet when the crooked parole officer tries to blackmail him into pulling a new job. When he ignores this, he is threatened by the Mario family mafia, and also tries to refuse this, insisting he only wants an honest life as the co-owner of a night club with his friend and former partner in crime and legitimate business Tommy “Five-Tone”. Eventually they put enough heat on him and he agrees to steal the maquette of Da Vinci’s Sforza statue the night before it’s auctioned off. The heist goes wrong and Hawk barely escapes with the statue, but the statue appears at the auction the next day, an excellent fake appraised as genuine by Anna Baragli from the Vatican, and then ludicrously wealthy couple Darwin and Minerva Mayflower enter and outbid everyone moments before the auctioneer’s lectern explodes. Soon, Hawk wakes up in Rome to Darwin Mayflower explaining in no uncertain terms that Hawk will be stealing from the Vatican Archive for him next. The Mayflowers are collecting the pieces of a crystal that forms the heart of a machine Leonardo Da Vinci accidentally transmuted lead to gold with and then tried to hide from the world. Hawk is trying to collect some peace and quiet, a chance at ending his dry spell from before he went to prison for a very long time, and above all, a good cup of coffee.

I suspect this is the movie Bruce Willis wanted to make after Die Hard got him the chance to make anything he wanted, and then audiences were deeply disappointed this wasn’t Die Hard. What it’s actually going for is a comic adventure romp with a heavy dose of Frank Sinatra veneration. Which isn’t even what I was expecting, I got the idea this was a modernized noir as in a detective story, when in fact it’s more of a heist story.

I will say the tone is a bit of a mess. It feels like it’s not sure if it wants to be a more grounded comedy like Indiana Jones or a more cartoonish adventure like Airplane!. It seems like Willis and MacDowell’s performances and the music are pulling it in the former direction and the writing, editing, and everyone else’s in the latter. This dissonance makes the swings of the plot feel more audacious, but in a fun way. For the first half of the movie, I was repeatedly dumbstruck by the story suddenly going in what seemed like the wildest direction possible, but in a good way. It was only when we see a Vatican wall crucifix light up and a cardinal talk to Anna through a hidden intercom that I really started to feel like I understood what this movie was supposed to be.

A major issue with the tack the movie takes, or at least the marketing, is that Hawk is positioned as a cool, confident, in control kind of guy, and then there is no point in the movie where he is actually justifiedly confident or in control. The whole story is about people manipulating him, manhandling him, and blackmailing him. He’s drugged and relocated multiple times. It’s tough to enjoy an action romp when the hero has no agency or power. Meanwhile, Richard E. Grant chews the scenery in every frame he’s in and James Coburn exudes the kind of energy I think we all expected from Hawk (this movie does owe a lot to Our Man Flynn, including a distinctive sound cue).

I really did enjoy this on its own terms, but I recognize how disjointed the execution was. Nobody liked this movie because nobody understood it, and it wasn’t what anybody but Bruce Willis wanted, but it’s the kind of movie where I was actually kept guessing and had a smile on my face the whole time. Could it do with a recut? Probably. But it’s already pretty close to the funky little thing it wants to be, only the timing was wrong, and the foam on the espresso was flat.