While it wouldn’t be entirely fair to credit Die Hard entirely for the superstardom of Bruce Willis (does Moonlighting mean nothing to anyone anymore?), watching this meteorite of charisma blow through the Nakatomi Plaza meant that it gave the actor some considerable clout. However, giving an actor carte blanche to suddenly realise various dream projects isn’t always the home run you’d expect them to be and a prime example is the mauling given to Hudson Hawk.
Finding the origins from a song he co-created back from his barman days (no, really), Willis hoped that his whacky, cartoon-inspired, anti-secret agent movie would create a brand new action hero the world could fall in love with. What followed was reports of an ego run amuck, ballooning costs and a domestic audience who didn’t give the slightest of shits about Willis’ typically smug brainchild.
But did Hudson Hawk really deserve the kicking it once received, especially considering it’s brand of humour and reliance on conspiracy theories to fuel its plot predated some noticable modern hits?
After spending 10 years in Sing Sing prison, Eddie Hawkins – aka. Hudson Hawk – is finally released looking none the worse for wear and feeling pretty optimistic about finally going straight for good. You see, Hudson Hawk is the world greatest cat burglar (something I’d actually dispute seeing as he’s just spent a decade inside) who has the talent to circumvent any modern security while using basic, day to day items, but after being picked up by his best friend, Tommy “Five Tone” Messina, he finds that various parties what him to instantly get back into the game.
If it isn’t his own parole officer leaning on him to break into an art gallery, it’s the Mario Brothers Mafia family and soon Hawk relents and steals a maquette of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Sforza. However, this where things get really complicated – you see, not only are a team of candy-bar themed CIA agents also involved in this mess, but everyone involved is being manipulated by wealthy, deranged couple, Darwin and Minerva Mayflower who want other various Da Vinci items swiped because they contain pieces of a mechanism that the artist invented that can turn lead into gold. If all that wasn’t enough, the Vatican has sent agents of their counter-espionage section in to sort out this mess and Hawk soon finds himself falling for agent Anna Baragli despite the fact that she’s taken her vows.
In the midst of all this chaos that involved various explosions, a knife wielding butler, endless betrayals and more smug witticisms than a Bing Crosby/Bob Hope marathon, can Hudson Hawk and Five Tone manage to figure out who is actually on who’s side and escape this caper in order for Hawk to finally enjoy that cappuccino he’s been waiting over a decade for..?
The world seemingly wasn’t ready for Hudson Hawk back in 1991 as it found Bruce Willis in something of a zany mood, banking that the scale and action of a Die Hard would mesh with the type of self aware smarts you’d get in an episode of Moonlighting. On top of that, it’s also have the tone and demeanor of your average Looney Tunes cartoon with reality mostly being hurled out of the nearest window in order to create some sort of whacky, live action cartoon, that still contained all the bloodshed and swearing that an R rated movie contains. In many ways, this means that the once, much maligned Hudson Hawk was somewhat ahead of its time as not only is it’s wild, goofy, reality breaking humour not a hundred miles away from the fast talking surrealism of your average Deadpool movie, but all the conspiracy plot stuff, and the subsequent mad dash for hidden items predates even Dan Brown’s book of The Da Vinci Code, let alone those movies that repeatedly helped pad out the bank accounts of both Tom Hanks and Ron Howard.
Also, for all it’s faults (and we’ll get to those in a moment), Bruce Willis’ truly bizarre vanity project is a lively reminder of a decade that wasn’t afraid to take some wild-ass swings every now and then. Hudson Hawk could be easily labelled with such descriptions as “overblown”, “inconsistent” and “bloody stupid”, but there’s no way you could ever denounce it as dull – not when you has such confounding sights as a toothy James Coburn presiding over his team of CIA agents named for various sugary treats that not only features David Caruso as a mute chameleon named Kit Kat, but also gives us Andrew Bryniarski as a lumbering, idiotic powerhouse with the tag, Butterfinger. Thanks to this eccentric streak, there’s a feeling that while many mature audiences back in the early nineties were left utterly flummoxed by this tonal train wreck, kids probably embraced the living shit out of Willis shifting between cool cat and prat falling stooge while a bunch of random shit occurred around him.
However, I have to say that I regrettably wasn’t one of those kids, and while I appreciate that Willis and director Michael (Heathers) Lehmann wanted to do something fiercely different, the slapstick charms of Hudson Hawk have always been fairly lost to me. Maybe it’s because in my search for another Die Hard fix in 1991, I figured that the bombastic delights of Tony Scott’s The Last Boy Scout was more what I needed and when comparing Willis putting people’s noses through their brains to a running joke of him constantly getting thwarted from drinking a cappuccino as he’s mummified in plot armour, the decision was fairly simple. Another issue is as wild and loopy as the movie is, it’s rarely actually laugh out loud funny and at times its unrestrained attempts at jokes end up backfiring horribly as it’s star namely tries to smirk his way through it. It’s obvious that both he and Danny Aiello are trying to bang out some sort of comedy double act like the aforementioned Cosby/Hope or Abbott and Costello, but while they inexplicably sing and dance their way through their heists (Hawk times his robberies to the lengths of songs which he belts out as he works), but their snappy banter feels a bit too forced. Also feeling fairing uncomfortable is a tone that’s somehow suppose to get us to care about our swaggering hero and still let both Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard go completely off the rails as the villainous Mayflowers. On top of that, action sequences complete with comedy sound effects, bad guys come complete dressed in primary colours and Andie MacDowell proves that broad comedy isn’t her forte in a scene that requires her to eek like a dolphin for what feels an eternity.
While I’ll happily admit that Hudson Hawk happily fulfills the brief of what constitutes a cult classic thanks to it’s repeatedly being championed by those who adored it as a child; however, the fact that it’s an 80s action movie shot like a Joel Schumacher Batman film has never managed to win me over as much as others. Worth its weight in lead when it comes to crazed, 90s misfires, for all of his capering and mugging, Willis never managed to turn his pet project into gold.
“Yippie-Kai-Yay Motherfucker!” announced Bruce back in Die Hard. “Slurp my butt!” announced Hawk only three years later. ‘Nuff said, really.
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