A 1991 Bruce Willis action/comedy doesn’t seem like the place where one would find a six-minute sequence with Leonardo da Vinci in his workshop, a duet of “Swinging on a Star,” a secret order of sleuthing nuns, or Sandra Bernhard. This is, after all, the hyperviolent era of The Last Boy Scout and Die Hard 2. But those surprises are a big part of the charm of Hudson Hawk — a movie that doesn’t so much defy expectations as completely ignores them.
Part Hope and Crosby road movie, part conspiracy caper, and part Rat Pack by way of The Blues Brothers, Hudson Hawk stars Willis as the eponymous hero, the world’s most notorious cat burglar alongside his longtime friend and partner Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello). After being released from a 10-year sentence at Sing Sing, Hawk is looking for two things: a shot at going clean and a cappuccino. Unfortunately, he struggles to find both and instead winds up getting pulled in a web of espionage, organized crime, world domination, and a Renaissance-era conspiracy. Naturally.
While that’s a lot to pack into one movie, no movie seems to have more fun in telling its own story, gleefully bouncing from scene-to-scene, continent-to-continent, from one over-the-top scenario to another.
Still, none of that mattered to audiences when the film opened third on a weekend that also saw the debuts of Backdraft and Thelma Louise (which actually finished fourth). Hudson Hawk became a notorious bomb and an example of movie-star hubris. But as the years have gone by and the film has been discovered on cable and via home video, a small, but vocal fandom has emerged that defends Hudson Hawk as a film wronged by an off-base marketing campaign and humorless critics who weren’t in on the joke.
Are they right? Let’s examine if Hudson Hawk deserves its sour reputation or if it’s worthy of another glance.
You Wouldn’t Know From The Trailer, But It’s A Satirical Clockpunk Caper
It’s not hard to see where a trailer like this would’ve lead to some disappointed moviegoers. All of Willis’ one-liners seem like well-timed action movie quips, instead of what they really are: snippets from a film that is built entirely out of one-liners. Well, that, and over-the-top performances, cartoon sound effects, and the occasional song and dance number.
The musical numbers aside, it’s easy to speculate that a slightly different Hudson Hawk trailer might have better prepared audiences, thus possibly changing how it was received. After that first gloomy weekend, the film’s tagline “Catch the Adventure, Catch the Excitement, Catch the Hawk” had the middle line changed to “Catch the Laughs” as a way to underscore the comedic elements, but it was too little, too late.
A Film With A Song In Its Heart And Its DNA
https://youtu.be/D8KvM3vZo0w
“You had to have a good song to walk down the street in New York,” explains Willis during a DVD special feature alongside his friend and collaborator Robert Kraft, who co-wrote the film’s story, penned its music, and served as an executive producer. The two explain their history together as longtime buddies who grew up together in Hoboken, New Jersey while Willis was bartending and Kraft was playing piano in cafes around town.
The idea stuck with Willis, who first envisioned Hawk as a twentysomething “James Bond, but before he was James Bond,” eventually turning the character into a master thief, whose first few drafts had Hawk tasked with stealing a heart for a heart transplant. The project was put on the back-burner, but after Willis’ acting career and Kraft’s music career had taken off, they came back around to bring Hudson Hawk to life.
To help understand the kind of aesthetic these two were looking for, look no further than their first collaboration, Willis’ album The Return of Bruno, produced by Kraft and featuring Willis on vocals. Released in 1987, the album itself was both a straightforward R&B record, as well as the soundtrack to a fake HBO documentary starring Willis as the titular Bruno. Musicians on the album included Booker T. Jones, along with members of both The Pointer Sisters and The Temptations.
As with The Return of Bruno, Kraft was able to assemble a dream team when it came to the soundtrack for Hudson Hawk. The band included members of Toto and Steely Dan, as well as The Night Tripper himself, Dr. John on piano and lead vocals. With this kind of musical star power, it’d be easy to dismiss Hudson Hawk as a vanity project — which it is on some level — except that both Willis and Kraft don’t see it as an elaborate inside joke, but as a movie they still believe in. In that same interview, Willis talks about how surprised he was at the movie’s lackluster reception, adding (more than once) that it still makes him laugh.
(Side note: the video for the Hudson Hawk theme song was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who told Willis during filming that he’d like to make a movie with him one day. Twelve years later, he directed Willis in Tears of the Sun.)
Slapstick With Severe Consequence
A common complaint is the film is tonally all over the place, which is, honestly, pretty accurate. One moment, Hawk falls off a building into a chair surrounded mobsters and a blade-wielding butler. Then, before you know it, the butler makes an eye-roll-worthy pun about “making the cut” before abruptly slashing a character’s throat, complete with blood splattering across Hawk’s face. It’s this kind of violent cartoon sensibility — an even split between Wile E. Coyote with Itchy and Scratchy — that audiences didn’t quite know how to take.
Simply put, Hudson Hawk unapologetically writes its own rules, which alternate between the laughably mundane and the violently over-the-top. Even in Hawk and Tommy’s old hangout, once a rundown dive bar, now a bustling, upscale bistro, a bullet can be fired by mobsters and absolutely no one notices, save for Hawk, who’s only upset that the gunshot cost him his cappuccino.
To play up the violence or to play down the comedy might have shifted the movie into a more predictable tone, but it would have taken away everything that’s so uniquely Hudson Hawk about it. Director Michael Lehmann, who had managed to walk the line between cynically funny and darkly macabre with Heathers in 1988, helps by indulging in all of the scripts many absurdities. As does the supporting cast, which includes Andie MacDowell, David Caruso, Frank Stallone, James Coburn, Richard E. Grant, and Bernhard.
While everyone gets their turn to chew the scenery, no one seems to have more fun with it than Bernhard as Minerva Mayflower, one-half of a power-hungry couple bent on world domination. While the movie is abundant with plot twists and location changes, Bernhard remains the film’s de facto perfect villain. Meanwhile, the film runs amuck with gags about paralysis drugs, phone book puns, and two gangsters named the Mario brothers (always mentioned with a straight face) all played with just enough wink-at-the-audience self-awareness.
A Cult Comedy In Search Of A Cult
Critics pulled no punches when it came to Hudson Hawk. The New York Times called it “a colossally sour and ill-conceived misfire,” and Entertainment Weekly said it “may be the first would-be blockbuster that’s a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose.” The most telling commentary may have come from Newsweek a month after Memorial Day, proclaiming the summer cinematic climate as being “only a few weeks old and already there’s blood on the ground – the $50 million corpse of Hudson Hawk.”
The Chicago Tribune even speculated that if it failed, Hudson Hawk would end up being “the last of a dying breed: the super-expensive summer movie.” Of course, with blockbuster movies raking in billions of dollars these days, it’s obvious that prediction didn’t come true.
While it certainly didn’t kill the big-budget summer movie, in Willis’ own words, Hudson Hawk did “kinda became this cult film,” which he says in a way that makes you almost wonder if he resents what his one-time opus ended up becoming. For as wacky and irreverent as the movie was, it was made in all sincerity, a simultaneous homage to retro-cool and sophomoric slapstick.
In a 1991 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Willis compares Hudson Hawk to It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which is not only a great comparison, but a fine way to prepare someone for the film who’s never seen it. Sure, in the original trailer, hyping Hudson Hawk as a big-budget heist movie with the occasional wisecrack was way off the mark, but it’s difficult to imagine a way to accurately explain it during a 90-second commercial. Similarly, the claim that it was ahead of its time makes it difficult to imagine what cinematic era this would’ve fit into, exactly.
None of this is to say that Hudson Hawk isn’t downright delightful. It’s the kind of film that grabs you by the wrist and pulls you along while expecting a you to suspend your disbelief. And that’s all that’s really required to enjoy it — simply accept Hudson Hawk for what it is: an over-exaggerated, violent, comical, borderline nonsensical heist film that treats viewers to Danny Aiello’s singing voice.
