When certain mega-budget blockbusters crash and burn spectacularly with critics and bat the box office, the naive movie fan in me hopes that these beleaguered films will find a health respect from a sizable cult audience in the years to come. Alas, it is rarely the case as Howard The Duck, The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle and Hudson Hawk remain pretty much unloved. A pity since all three, especially the later are original and quirky adventure films with humour and imagination to spare.
Hudson Hawk was a vanity project for rising action megastar Bruce Willis in the early 90's derived from a character he co-created with Robert Kraft when fannying around with some jazz jamming bullcrap. Its barking plot has a reformed ex-thief being cohered into stealing some of Leonard Da Vinci's finest works for a world domination plot. The story is irrelevant next to the film's priority of stuffing the running time with as many weird situations, comedy set pieces and bizarro characters as it can possible accommodate. So on top of cappuccino craving Eddie Hawkins (Willis), you've got his deathproof partner Danny Aiello, the dolphin talking undercover nun Andie MacDowell, corrupt CIA chief James Coburn and his trio of chocolate codenamed operatives which include a mute David Caruso, the persuasive Mafia boss Frank Stallone, and scene stealers Richard E Grant and Sandra Bernhard as eccentric, megalomaniac corporation owners. The humour is wildly irreverent, and often absurd in a loony tunes, cartoony kind of way and even veers into musical territory with reditions of old time swing numbers like Swingin' On A Star.
Tonally it's a bit of a mess, not knowing whether it wants to be a Tom & Jerry cartoon, an ingenious caper movie or a hard-nosed 90's action movie complete with ill-fitting, R-rated profanity. But it does give Hudson Hawk a flavor that has never been repeated in cinema, either before or after, and for that we are truly grateful.
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