Jim McLennan, Author at Girls With Guns

Mythica: A Quest for Heroes

By Jim McLennan October 26, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★★★
“Dungeons & Dragons. Without dungeons. Or dragons.”

I could virtually hear the d20s rolling for chunks of this one. Not to say that is a bad thing as such; it quite took me back to my college days, when I spent far more time than I should, lurking in the corners of the student union, trying to nurse my ferociously-toasted paladin through another death-trap! The heroine here is Marek (Stone), a slave with a club foot who has higher aspirations, dabbles in magic, and runs away from her master to seek her fame and fortune. She talks her way into a mission no other adventurer will accept, rescuing the sister of haughty high priestess Teela (Posener), who has been kidnapped by orcs, and adds a gruff fighter, Thane (Johnson), and sly thief Dagen (Stormoen) to complete the ~~parade of obvious stereotypes~~, er, sorry, I meant to write “party of adventurers”. They head off to follow the orcs, only to find Teela’s sister is not there, and is apparently with a far bigger, more unpleasant monster, possessing a lot more hit points and higher armour-class.

All my cynicism (which you may just have been able to detect in the above) aside, I actually didn’t hate this, despite its horribly derivative nature and failure to deliver any kind of ending [it being the first in an intended three-part saga coughHobbitcough]. Far from it, actually: if painfully obvious, the characters are still fun to be around, and the actors embrace them with gusto, which help bring them to life. Marek, in particular, has the potential to have a good character arc, since she appears to possess occult talents, which are only scratched here, coming out in dire emergencies – conveniently for the story! She is disabled, but not defined by it. Save a couple of scenes, such as the one where she begs Teela’s to heal her, it’s easy to forget her impediment, and there’s no doubting her courage, wits and loyalty, which make for a winning combination in a fantasy lead.

About the only name you’ll recognize here is Kevin Sorbo, who has basically one scene as Marek’s magical mentor, though I get the feeling he will be back in subsequent parts. Still, if you rent this expecting more based on the promotional material, you’ll be disappointed. Fortunately, I had no such preconceptions, and was able to enjoy what is, in many way, a throwback to the eighties and nineties when, it seems, there was a new one of these out every other time I went to the video-store. [Usually made in Argentina. For Roger Corman] If I can’t say I am anticipating future installments with breathless excitement, I can’t say I will actively avoid them either; mild anticipation is likely about the mark. Coming from someone who has sat through his share of bad genre entries, that’s no mean feat.

Dir: Anne K. Black
Star: Melanie Stone, Adam Johnson, Jake Stormoen, Nicola Posener

Zero Motivation

By Jim McLennan October 21, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★★★½
“Inaction heroines.”

While a period of national service in the armed forces may seem a good idea in theory, this satirical Israeli film is likely a good depiction of what it means in practice: a lot of thoroughly unmotivated soldiers, who just want to kill time and GTFO back to civilian life. This may not seem like an inspiring subject for a movie, yet somehow, ends up an endearing and amusing look at life in the armed forces, when your chief responsibility is basically to be in charge of shredding unwanted documents. For there is, it appears, a lot of bureaucracy and shuffling of paperwork in the the Israeli army, and that’s what Daffi (Tagar), Zohar (Ivgy) and their colleagues have to do.

They work in the office of their base, under the wary guise of long-suffering matriarch officer Rama (Klein), who tries to encourage their military habits into concepts such as, “Being a paper shredding NCO is what you make of it.” Of course, being young women, they are more interested in men, personal drama and owning the office high-score on Minesweeper. Or in Daffi’s case, getting out of the desert and being sent to an urban post like Tel Aviv. That requires her completing officer training, but when she does, Daffi discovers exactly why Rama perpetually has that look, and sets up a staple-gun shoot-out (right) with Zohar, after Daffi tries to erase her games.

Writer-director Lavie based the script on her own experiences, saying, “Like most girls during their two years of service, we didn’t risk our lives. But we were definitely in danger of dying of boredom.” There’s definitely an air of Private Benjamin here, and in particular Goldie Hawn griping, “I joined a different army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms. ” While the conscripts here are under fewer illusions on their way in, it does a wonderful job of illustrating the gap between the broader perception of army life, and the tedious reality, which involves far more meetings, forms and guard duty. And for the last-named, not even the exciting stuff at the gates, but safely inside the base, where the sole “threat” is soldiers who can’t find the canteen.

The film is loosely divided into three sections, and it manages to juggle the comedic and dramatic elements quite nicely, so that some quite sharp shifts in tone are not too jarring. It’s certainly a concept which could easily be extended to a TV series – think M.A.S.H. in the Israeli desert, though I would certainly not have minded some more actual action. As is, the film may be almost the antithesis of what you’d expect in a “girls with guns” movie, yet you’d be hard-pushed to conclude this was a particularly bad thing. What it may lack in pulse-pounding, adrenalin-powered gunplay, is balanced by a selection of quirkily entertaining characters and a sharply-observed script.

Dir: Talya Lavie
Star: Nelly Tagar, Shani Klein, Dana Ivgy, Heli Twito

Dark Angel: The Ascent

By Jim McLennan October 19, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★★½
“The devil in the details.”

This is actually a really interesting idea. We generally think of devils as “bad” – but what if they don’t see themselves the same way, and feel they are doing an important part of the Lord’s work, by punishing sinners? That’s the concept here, which sees the demonic Veronica (Featherstone) clamber out of hell through a conveniently unguarded exit, to see what the world above is like – let’s face it, since all she gets are the wrongdoers sent to damnation, her opinion is a little skewed. Apparently unaware of such everyday issues as traffic (and likely more importantly for most male viewers, clothes), she rapidly gets nailed by a truck. In hospital, she is treated by Dr. Max Barris (Markel), who is perplexed by the odd behaviour of his new patient, but she pulls a Satanic version of the Jedi mind trick, and convinces him that she should move into his apartment. There, she watches television, discovers that there are plenty of perfectly-good wrongdoers here on Earth who need to be punished, and begins a vigilante campaign to take them out. This draws the attention of both the local cops investigating the trail of corpses, and corrupt local official, Mayor Wharton (James), who becomes Veronica’s #1 target.

I love films with a different take on the traditional heaven/hell division – Don’t Tempt Me is a personal fave – and this movie also raises some interesting questions, about whether it’s acceptable to do bad things for good reason. An example: generally, ripping someone’s spine out of there back is frowned up in most cultures. But what if they have been caught in the act of trying to rape a young woman? Where is your morality now? This isn’t pulled out thin air, and is actually what happens here; Veronica appears faintly perplexed that the victim doesn’t want the dripping spine as a souvenir of the incident. Of course, her ability to do that Jedi thing certainly makes life easier, even when her actions draw increasing attention – “covering her tracks” should be added to her long list: “Things of which I’m entirely oblivious.” It’s a shame that there isn’t more investigation into the spiritual aspects, like the scene where she meets a pair of nuns, and gets down on her knees for them. The poor sisters are even more confused when the cross they give Veronica bursts into flames…

Instead, the film limps off into something that’s partly a love-story, and partly Veronica stalking the Mayor, neither of which are anywhere near as interesting. It feels as if they came up with the brilliant idea, started filming a movie based on the concept… and only then figured out they didn’t know what to do with it. Things peter out in a disappointing matter, and I suspect the makers (it’s a Charles Band production) were looking to start another of their franchises, alongside Trancers, Demonic Toys, etc. Perhaps future installments could have done a better job of exploring the potential in a universe, which is only hinted at here.

Dir: Linda Hassani
Star: Angela Featherstone, Daniel Markel, Milton James, Michael C. Mahon

The Angry River

By Jim McLennan October 14, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★★½
“A bridge too far.”

Not just Angela Mao’s feature debut, it was also the first film produced by then-fledgling studio Golden Harvest, who would go on to become arguably the premier name in Hong Kong Film production, up until the colony’s handover back to China in 1999. Even discounting their work with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Tsui Hark, Stephen Chow, Donnie Yen, etc. and sticking purely to the action heroine field, Golden Harvest were the company behind She Shoots Straight, the Inspector Wears Skirts series and Naked Killer. Their commitment to our field is apparent right from this inaugural movie, where Mao plays dutiful daughter Lan Feng, whose father becomes one of the victims of ‘Poison Dart’, whose name pretty much explains what he does. Cursed to a long lingering death, the only cure is a rare herb.

Lan sets off to find it, crossing the fiery Angry River, going through the Merciless Pass, and encountering another couple of dangers without names, but we might as well call them the Cave of Really Bad Optical Effects, and the Giant Gecko That Knows Kung-Fu. The latter actually defeats our heroine (though she does save 15% on her car insurance), but impressed by her filial piety, she is given the herb, albeit at the cost of losing her kung-fu skills. She then has to make her way back home, which is even more perilous now she can’t fight, and has to rely on the kindness of strangers to protect her, because there are a lot of other people who are also very keen to get their hands on the mystical plant, whose powers extend beyond being merely an antidote to poison. And when she finally returns to her home, a nastier shock awaits.

Maybe it is just me: I kept being reminded of Homer’s Odyssey, with Mao playing the hero, whose objective, simply to get back home is endlessly diverted and derailed by external forces. I suspect any such similarity is, as they say, purely coincidental, and they just share the same basic plot of the hero’s journey, as introduced by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But there are elements where you can tell it was a debut film, such as the rubber-suited lizard which, it’s charitable to say, presumably worked better on the page than the screen. It’s also a mis-step to rob the heroine of her powers for almost the entire second-half, leaving her a spectator to her own story – even Odysseus only spent a bit of time tied to the mast. Particularly early on, Mao’s fights feel stilted – punch-pause-block-pause-kick – though there actually is a storyline reason for why she has to be reined in to start with, in order that Mao can go full-throttle at the end [like I said, the herb has other uses…] You can see where they were aiming – slightly to the side of the then-dominant Shaw Brothers studio – yet overall, there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement here. As a first effort, I guess it’s okay.

Dir: Feng Huang
Star: Angela Mao, Kao Yuan, Pai Ying, Han Ying Chieh

Mutant World

By Jim McLennan October 12, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★½
“Well, it’s no Sharknado 2. It’s not even Sharknado 3.”

This SyFy original movie takes place mostly after an “Earth killer”-sized meteor has struck the Eastern seaboard of the United States. A group of Doomsday preppers, with slightly more warning than most, are able to take shelter inside their refuge, a former missile silo, and settle down to wait out the apocalypse going on above ground. 10 years later, they’re forced to send a small group back up to the surface as the result of damage to their solar panels. Leading that patrol is Melissa King (Deveaux), whose father Marcus (Kim Coates, whom you will recognize if you’re a Sons of Anarchy fan) was the leader of the group, but was trapped outside their sanctuary when the meteor hit. The patrol discovers that the radiation resulting from the impact has wiped out most of humanity – but the survivors have been mutated by it, and turned into thoroughly unpleasant monsters. Exploring further, they find what appears to be sanctuary, populated by other survivors, only to discover that when the sun goes down, they too are no longer human. Fortunately for them, assistance is at hand in the former of the Preacher (Ashanti), a motorcycle riding, warrior-priestess, who appears to be in contact with the actual remnants of mankind.

Oh, dear. The potential is here, but is buried deeper than a nuclear fallout shelter, because there is hardly any aspect that is not badly botched, right from the start: Coates, the only real “name” in the cast, is barely in the film, the kind of bait-and-switch which is rarely a good sign. The script is just terrible: what’s supposed to be a quick mission up top to fix the power, somehow spirals off into a jolly road-trip, with no apparent regard for the people back in the bunker. While the mutants’ glowing green eyes are kinda cool, that is about as far as both the imagination and the budget goes; there’s no explanation provided either, for why some people are totally mutated, some are only mutated at night (!), and others, like the Preacher, are apparently entirely untroubled by mutantism, despite wearing no more protection than a long trench-coat. And don’t even get me started on Ashanti’s performance, which is about as unconvincing as you’d expect from a singer-slash-dancer-slash-whatever.

The film is clearly trying to establish Melissa’s credentials as some kind of a bad-ass, judging by the poorly-choreographed fight she has with the shelter leader, before heading up top [also worth noting: no-one appears to have aged or been changed in the slightest by the passage of a decade, whether underground or on the surface]. Outside of very intermittent moments, it doesn’t work, though in comparison to Ashanti, Coates is positively an Oscar-winner. I did somewhat appreciate the element of role-reversal found here, with the most bad-ass roles given to the actresses. However, good intentions are never enough to overcome execution as horribly flawed as we see here. By the end, I was hoping for another meteor strike, to put both the characters and the viewers out of our mutual misery.

Dir: David Winning
Star: Holly Deveaux, Ashanti, Amber Marshall, Jason Cermak

Hot Pursuit

By Jim McLennan October 7, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★★½
“Colombia 1, America 1.”

Your tolerance for this may well depend on your fondness for Modern Family, in which Vergara plays Gloria, who is much the same character: a Colombian spitfire trophy-wife. It works rather better there, as part of the broad palette of distinct individuals, and in an episode that lasts 30 minutes, including commercials. You get the sense she might not be too easy to live with, and the 85 minutes here does sometimes become more a slog than a pleasure, and we speak as big fans of Family. Here, rather than the wife of a closet magnate, Daniella Riva (Vergara) is married to the henchman of a drug lord, who gets gunned down after agreeing to testify against his employer (Cosio), just as the straight-laced Officer Cooper (Witherspoon) arrives to escort them to court. When it becomes clear some corrupt cops are in on the action, Cooper and Riva are forced to strike out on their own, making for an unlikely odd couple, whose spiky relationship grows over the course of their unscheduled road-trip.

It’s certainly far from novel, and the whole concept is so well-worn and utterly predictable, the script might as well have grooves and be mounted on rails. This is not a film to watch if you want to be surprised, in any shape or form; it’s more like a comfy jersey, that you pull on, knowing exactly what to expect. As such, there are some moments which are genuinely amusing, such as when Cooper ends up coked-up by (literal) accident, chattering away like a highly-caffeinated dolphin. It’s not Witherspoon’s first entry here either; back in her early days, Freeway won our Seal of Approval, and more recently, we also reviewed Wild, which had her stepping out into the wilderness. This is a more obvious role, in more ways than one; like the story, Cooper is over-familiar from a hundred other comedies, and making her a woman isn’t sufficient deviation to create interest. Witherspoon certainly tries, and the effort is palpable; however, there’s only so far effort can take you, given such lazy writing.

With Vergara, the problem is almost the reverse; Riva certainly has more of an arc than Cooper, and is given some genuine motivation for her actions, rather than existing purely because the plot demands it. However, if you’ve caught one episode of Modern Family, you’ve already seen all this performance has to offer. It probably says a lot, that Vergara’s turn in Machete Kills offered a more highly-nuanced approach to acting. I’m thinking this is probably the first time Machete Kills and “highly-nuanced” have ever been used in the same sentence. The end result just about manages to skate by on the charisma of its two leads, and I can’t say we were ever bored; that hardly counts as anything even approaching a glowing recommendation, however, and you should be in a thoroughly undemanding mood before approaching this one.

Dir: Anne Fletcher
Star: Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, Robert Kazinsky, Joaquín Cosio,

Tracks

By Jim McLennan October 5, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★★★½
“Because Cheryl Strayed is a wuss.”

I am getting an echo of Wild here, even though this actually came out first. Both are based on books by women who decided to deal with their emotional and psychological baggage by striking out on a lone trek through the wilderness. But rather than the relatively civilized world of the Pacific Crest Trail, the heroine here, Robyn Davidson (Wasikowska), heads 1,700 miles across the Australian outback, from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, accompanied by four camels and a dog. That’s hardcore, being far more of a solo voyage, with long periods where Davidson is entirely on her own – the sole regular companion is photographer Rick Smolan (Driver), who drops in sporadically to document the trek for her sponsor, National Geographic magazine. We first see Davidson as she arrives in Alice Spring, following her as she goes from a naive woman with no experience of the livestock she’ll be managing, to someone who can handle what’s basically a cross between a cow with a bad attitude and a giraffe.

As with Strayed, there is trauma in the past which, it’s implied, acts as the trigger for the expedition. In the case of Davidson, it’s more childhood trauma, with a mother who committed suicide, and a father who, unable to cope with the aftermath, shipped Robyn off and had her dog put down. This is revealed in flashbacks, and for my money, is handled rather better than in Wild, in part because it doesn’t dwell on this or make it the focus. Tracks is more about the physical journey, with the spiritual one a side-dish, the reverse of the situation in Wild.

This does require a lot more restraint from Wasikowska, in terms of her performance: she has to do more acting and less Acting, if you see what I mean. I prefer that approach, and the smaller, quieter portrayal we get here only emphasizes the enormity of the landscape through which she is moving. The outback is, in many ways, an unspoken character here, sometimes threatening, sometimes staggeringly alluring, though I’d have been interested to hear some more of the nuts and bolts of the expedition: even prosaic stuff, such as, how the hell does Robyn not get incinerated without a hat? Maybe there’s a documentary film that can fill in these blanks.

There’s not much sense of threat on the human side, with just about everyone who encounters the “camel lady” being generally supportive. The worst issue is when Rick photographs an Aboriginal ceremony he shouldn’t be, leading to some friction with the natives, but it’s hardly the stuff of great drama. It’s more of a character study/travelogue, and from what I’ve seen, Wasikowska – best know as Alice in Tim Burton’s Wonderland – certainly looks the part of Davidson. Yet its calm tranquility ends up more a strength than a weakness, and even when there isn’t much going on, the landscapes still hold your attention with their sparse beauty.

Dir: John Curran
Star: Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver, Rolley Mintuma

Evangeline

By Jim McLennan October 2, 2015 May 6, 2020 Review

★½
“Revenge – less eaten cold than luke-warm leftovers.”

While I can’t find any sources to back my memory, I vaguely recall hearing a while ago about plans, either for a sequel or a reboot, to make a female version of The Crow. This seems like much the same thing, though based on the incoherent results here, they probably should bury the concept alongside Brandon Lee. Eva (de Lieva) is a preacher’s daughter, who has apparently led a sheltered life before enrolling at college. It’s not long, however, before she is attending her first frat party; unsurprisingly, this leads to her driving the big white bus. Things then go from bad worse, as a subsequent invitation from a fellow student leads to her being drugged, taken to the forest, gang-raped by a trio led by Michael Konner (Harmon), and left for dead. Or perhaps actually dead. For what happens next is either a) Eva’s corpse is possessed by some kind of demonic entity, and restored to life to take revenge, or b) she merely thinks that’s what happened, this being her psyche’s way of explaining and justifying said revenge.

Both, widely disparate explanations are equally plausible, and writer/director Lam seems to have little or no interest in clarifying matter, perhaps because, from what I’ve read, she was more interested in making “feminist response horror,” whatever that is. As the quote mis-attributed to Sam Goldwyn put it, “If you have a message, call Western Union.” While I’ve no problems at all with messages in films, feminist or otherwise, they should always be secondary to the film, and you don’t get the feeling that’s the case here. Admittedly, this is because so little effort is put into telling a decent story: when you’ve so little idea of what’s going on, there’s no reason to care about any thing the creators are trying to say. Here, for example, there is also a confused and superfluous subplot about a PTSD-afflicted veteran, living in the woods, as well as an apparent serial killer, “Mr K”. The purpose of both these are obscure, since neither seem to add much of significance.

This is a bit of a shame, since the look of the film is much more decent than its content, aspects such as the photography, sound design and special effect meshing to an okay degree – even if some of the visual techniques do appear to have been lifted wholesale from a far better film about someone’s sanity falling apart and/or demons, Jacob’s Ladder. That creature, mostly seen in its grey, spindly fingers, is undeniably a creepy motif. However, particularly in this genre, style can only take you so far, before it emphasizes and exacerbates a lack of content. In that area, I kept hoping the film was going to deliver enough to justify its existence; but the end-credits rolled, and I was still left entirely unsatisfied.

Dir: Karen Lam
Star: Kat de Lieva , Richard Harmon, Mayumi Yoshida, David Lewis

Cutthroat Island: 20 years on

By Jim McLennan October 1, 2015 September 30, 2015 Feature

While there have been box-office bombs in the genre since – Tank Girl, Barb Wire, Catwoman – the epic scale of Cutthroat Island‘s failure surpasses them all. It cost $115 million to make, a sizable amount even now, yet didn’t even crack the top ten in the United States on its opening weekend, finishing behind Dracula: Dead and Loving It. The film barely grossed $10 million in North America, and still regularly appears on lists of the biggest cinematic financial flops, sometimes right at the top. With December marking the 20th anniversary of is release, let’s take a look back at what is perhaps the most infamous action heroine film of all time.

Its origins are tied to another ill-fated, woman pirate venture from around that time. Columbia’s equally big-budget saga, Mistress of the Seasm which foundered in the summer of 1993, after director Paul Verhoeven left the project. One of the reported replacements for Verhoeven was Finnish director Renny Harlin, although after he was dumped, and Verhoeven returned, the film’s intended star then jumped ship. That star was Harlin’s then fiancee, Geena Davis, apparently miffed at her other half being courted then rejected by the studio. A source said ”From what I understand, she’s decided she wants to make a movie with her future hubby.” Mario Kassar, the chief of rival studio Carolco, seized the chance to woo both Harlin and Davis for his rival project, which already had Michael Douglas signed on as the male lead and love interest. [Mistress never got made; in the light of subsequent events, that was likely a win for Columbia]

But Carolco were already in financial trouble, having fallen far from smash-hits such as Terminator 2 and Total Recall. They had restructured in 1992, and sold off shares in 1993, yet were still in such dire cash-flow straits that they could only afford one big-budget production. The studio decided to shelve another historical epic, Crusade, after its budget reached nine figures [this had been another Verhoeven project; he must really hate Harlin and Davis!], and concentrate purely on Island. This was, in effect, a last throw of the dice for the beleaguered company and they financed the production, with its expected $60 million budget, largely by pre-selling distribution rights to overseas investors.

However, trouble was brewing, as Harlin apparently kept beefing up Davis’s role, at the expense of Michael Douglas’s. Said the actor, “I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go. I was feeling uncomfortable, and I wanted out… Ultimately, comes one day, and the director says, ‘I’m happy with the direction the script is going.’ And I said: ‘God bless you. I’m not.’ ” No-one at Carolco either saw fit or was able to override Harlin, so Douglas left the project. Both Harlin and Davis expected it to fold entirely due to his departure, but Carolco had no way back from the financial abyss into which they had flung themselves, and had to go forward, holding both director and star to their contracts.

Harlin later recounted: “At that point I was left there with my then-wife, Geena Davis and myself, and a company that was already belly-up. We begged to be let go. We begged that we didn’t have to make this movie. We begged that we not be put in this position.” Davis concurs: “I, of course, assumed the whole project would be canceled. It was all based on Michael Douglas’s being in it. To my horror, I learned not only would they not cancel, but that I had a legal obligation to go ahead, unlike Michael. I tried desperately to get out of this movie.” Instead, Douglas was replaced by the considerably lower profile (and far cheaper) Matthew Modine. Yet even he was unhappy, complaining, “They didn’t give me the [new] script. They gave me the script that Michael had said yes to… It was about a guy and a girl, but when I arrived in Malta, it [had become] about a girl and her journey.”

Ah, yes. Malta. The film was to be shot there and in Thailand, and pre-production had to go on, despite no leading man, and with the script a work in progress. But why let that interfere? In a memo, Harlin wrote, “When the casting concerns have been resolved and I arrive in Malta, I want to see the most spectacular and eye-popping sets, the most interesting and unusual props, and especially weapons and special effects that leave the audience gasping in awe and stunts that no one thought possible before. No sequence or setting that you’ve seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea that has been previously used has to be reinvented and cranked up 10 times.” Seems a strange kind of message from someone supposedly desperate to get off the project, unless he was trying to push costs to a level where even Carolco would have to cry “Enough!” This theory might help explain stories like Harlin allegedly spending $15,000 to expedite getting his dog through Maltese quarantine.

There, the design team had to build its sets on spec, only to incur the extra costs of rebuilding them after Harlin finally arrived in Malta. Chief camera operator Nicola Pecorini quit, and two dozen crew members left in sympathy. A director of photography broke his leg in an accident. Raw sewage leaked into one of the tanks where actors were supposed to swim. While no-one questions the efforts of either Harlin or Davis, costs continued to escalate as the shoot moved to the Far East, where an inexperienced team struggled with the logistics of filming a largely water-bound production. The total cost of producing, distributing and marketing the film ended up at $121 million. Considering only four films released in 1995 took even $110 million at the US box-office, the chances of Island saving Carolco’s bacon were slim indeed. Indeed, it was already too late. If triggering a financial meltdown was Harlin’s aim, he succeeded; the company didn’t survive long enough to see Island in cinemas, declaring bankruptcy six weeks before its release in December 1995.

The film, to be honest, never really had a chance. Originally intended as a summer release, the production problems led to it being pushed back, and for some inexplicable reason it was sent to cinemas the weekend before Christmas, which was then hardly a tent-pole date for action blockbusters. Critical reaction was mixed, though hardly disastrous: it’s rated 37% fresh on RottenTomatoes.com, but Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four, saying, “Cutthroat Island is everything a movie named Cutthroat Island should be, and no more.” The audience, however, ignored it entirely. It opened at #11, taking in less than $2.4 million its opening weekend, and finishing below the likes of other openers such as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death or entirely forgotten family adventure Tom and Huck.

Those involved generally seem to look back on the results with fondness, though Modine expressed some bitterness at the time: “It’s the first movie I’ve worked on where the director never really spoke to me. It was frustrating and Renny spent a lot of his time just finding new ways to blow things up. He likes to blow things up.” His opinion seems to have mellowed, and he now says, “I’m still very pleased with the movie. I think that the movie was terribly harshly criticized. It’s a pirate movie! And it was attacked as though we tried to remake Gone With the Wind or something. It’s a really fun movie.” Davis agrees, saying, “The fact is, Renny and I are really proud of the movie,” and Harlin thinks, “It’s not Pirates of the Caribbean, but I think it’s a totally fine sort of family and young people’s pirate adventure. And I think that people just ganged [up] against it because it failed at the box office.”

Are people right to do so? Well, I’ll largely refer you over to our original review, though I did watch it again for the purposes of this piece. This time around, it seemed a film which should be more entertaining than it is, despite Harlin’s fondness for explosions – Modine was dead right there, with the director apparently oblivious to the fact that cannonballs were not rocket-propelled grenades that create giant fireballs on impact. Plausibility is utterly out the window, from the giant island with its sea-cliffs, hundreds of feet high, inexplicably missing from maps, through to the multiple zip-lines with which pirate vessels were apparently equipped. The dialogue certainly feels like it was made up on the fly, from virtually the heroine’s first line (“I took your balls”) to her last (“Bad Dawg!”). However, it doesn’t drag, and the main cast go at the material with sufficient energy to make for an entertaining two hours. I’ve seen far worse, much more successful films – hello, National Treasure.

One final, semi-ironic point. At the time, it was considered possible Hollywood would rein in the excess. as a result of the film’s failure. The following April, Daniel Jeffreys of The Independent wrote, “The films that have topped the box office list in the US since Cutthroat Island sank have had budgets well below $50m. Movies like Dead Man Walking, The Birdcage, Sense and Sensibility, 12 Monkeys and Mr Holland’s Opus have all cleared their modest costs with ease making three times as much money between them as Cutthroat Island lost. Next time Hollywood goes looking for buried treasure it might remember that and leave the lavish special effects at home.” But 20 years later, the top hits this year are Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Inside Out and Furious 7, whose production budgets alone – without distribution or marketing costs – average north of $190 million, making Island look positively restrained by comparison. Perhaps Renny and Geena were just ahead of their time, after all.