From Studio Killer to Overlooked Classic? Cutthroat Island is on 4K

Luke Y. Thompson's Latest 4K Film Review

I first saw Cutthroat Island about a week before at opened, at a free screening that in hindsight I suspect might have been for press. It already had the media-applied stench of doom attached; at the time, it seemed like an entertaining enough movie, and certainly not the disaster I'd heard it would be. In hindsight, it's been cited over and over as the reason we didn't get a Pirates of the Caribbean movie much sooner.

As an adult, I think it's no small factor that director Renny Harlin pushed his then-wife Geena Davis into the lead, an action heroine part which was, at the time, out of character for her. Audiences have a weird, irrational hatred of directors working with spouses – just ask Rob Zombie or James Gunn. I confess there was a period where I got tired of Rebecca Pidgeon always being the female lead in David Mamet movies, and seemingly the whole world got sick of Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, but let's be fair there – they were generally just as sick of Johnny Depp working with Tim Burton as well.

Audiences would ultimately cotton to Harlin and Davis as a team for The Long Kiss Goodnight, as he figured out how best to use her onscreen talent just before they divorced. Talk of a sequel to that has never gone very far, though it persists. Cutthroat Island, meanwhile, just came out on 4K as a Walmart-exclusive steelbook. StudioCanal did a new scan from the original 35 mm negative for this release – a trailer on the disc announces it's “from legendary studio Carolco,” which is especially ironic considering it's the very movie that finally bankrupted them.

Cutthroat Island is pretty much the prototype of what you'd expect “big budget action movie with pirates” would be. A hidden treasure map in three parts points the way to a lost island, and good pirates, bad pirates, and the authorities are in a race to find it, culminating in a big ship-to-ship battle. There's nothing wrong with that formula, nor Harlin's adding in of explosions everywhere...those darn barrels of gunpowder are just lying all over the place, asking for it!

I'm not generally one of those folks who thinks “They did it for real!” inherently makes a movie better – if I'm convinced in the moment of the reality, and find out later they used CG, matte paintings, or even puppets, so what? Tom Cruise's sound-barrier break in Top Gun Maverick looks and plays the same as Ryan Gosling's in First Man – if one of them was in a real jet and the other a gigantic simulator, it makes less difference to me than Cruise seems to think. 

With that said, when one looks back on a 1995 movie, knowing what could and could not be done with CG, the money spends feel vast. Entire ships and buildings were built and blown up for this movie, to an extent that must even then have felt irresponsible in a $100 million movie without an A-list action star. Michael Douglas was the intended and agreed-upon star, but apparently he balked at the notion of working with a leading lady married to the director. Many others were subsequently approached, with Matthew Modine clearly close to a last choice. Davis wanted to be the leading lady rather than the main lead, but with the star gone, Harlin had to work with the star he knew he could trust, and paid money out of his own pocket to get a script rewrite with Davis' character as the protagonist instead. The movie's progressive gender-role-flipping was an accident borne of necessity, but they leaned into it. There wasn't any choice – even as all signs pointed to the movie being a disaster, Harlin was threatened with a major lawsuit if he quit.

Carolco went all in anyway, and the money's right there on the screen. Elaborate sets, hordes of extras, and a ship-to-ship finale in which both ships were fully constructed in a giant tank do not go to waste. Harlin and all the various writers were fans of classic pirate movies and did their best to evoke them; one suspects a touch of Disney ride influence snuck in there, what with several close-ups of corpses and a large eel animated by Henson Studios. The problems with Cutthroat Island are basically twofold: the audience didn't care about a revival of classic pirate movies, and Davis is somewhat miscast in the lead.

Harlin aspired to a slightly campy tone, which is fine as far as that goes, but Davis brings her quirky-awkward comedic persona to a role that requires Tyrone Power/Errol Flynn-style over-the-top macho energy. The Long Kiss Goodnight would work for her because it gave her a split personality so she could play both ends of that archetype; Cutthroat Island tries to put them both in one person, making that character of Morgan Adams feel more tentative than she should. As un-woke as this may sound, she and Modine probably should have swapped roles, with her as the con-woman and him the chest-puffing outlaw, but his name drew less money than hers at the time, in addition to all the other factors in play. Modine's essentially doing Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride, which works well enough.

The villains understand the assignment, with Patrick Malahide offering icy malevolence as Governor Ainslee, and Frank Langella playing to the cheap seats as the ridiculously named evil pirate “Dawg.” They commit fully to their traits in a way the conflicted writing for Morgan won't allow Davis to do. '90s audiences looked for irony and some level of deconstruction, and Cutthroat doesn't quite play it either straight enough or winking enough. All that said, it's a fun enough action romp that I'm hard-pressed to imagine anyone hating – it just lacked a solid lure to bring audiences in. 

Correction/modification: there is one aspect I hate, and that's the constant resorting to monkey reaction shots every time a gag needs a punchline. If it wasn't a tiresome cliché then – and I honestly can't remember if we were sick of pet monkeys in movies or not at the time – it certainly is now.

Digital effects aren't absent, but they're well-hidden, limited to adding flames, water, or the moon, and deleting stunt harnesses; that sort of thing. Harlin wanted to keep it real, and even had the actors do as many of their own stunts as possible, with Modine spending his off-hours learning even more so he could do more. The work pays off in impeccable action sequences, even though it didn't do so at the box office. Cutthroat Island may be renowned for making pirate movies briefly toxic, but it also set a benchmark that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies had to beat. They one-upped with both Johnny Depp's utterly committed madness and the added supernatural elements, but clearly learned from what had come before.

The 4K conversion is an interesting case, especially given the recent debates over James Cameron digitally erasing grain from his recent True Lies disc. This 4K really ups the grain on most of it, above and beyond the 1080. Original D.P. Oliver Wood's night shoots are crisper and shinier, but after sustaining an injury on set he was replaced by Peter Levy, and the new transfer makes it easier to spot the differences in approach. Harlin's fond of dust clouds, and in some cases the grain and the dust combine to make what looks like digital noise. Water droplets and surfaces look great with the extra detail, but it's odd to have the 1080 look clearer and less grainy. On the other hand, grain looks more like film, and some will prefer it. So you have two options.

Now, consider the extras, all of which are exclusive to the Blu-ray disc except the commentary, and NONE of which comes with the digital version on Fandango At Home. In addition to porting over the previous extras from 2008, Studio Canal has commissioned some new ones, and the contrast is not just wonderful, but borderline Criterion-worthy. Let's get into it. First, there's the original commentary by Harlin, in which he admits to the film's failure, explains every hardship that came his way, and expresses hope that we'll get some enjoyment out of the movie now. An old making-of featurette is all rah-rah hype, with a narrator describing the film's entire plot. Then there's a behind-the-scenes montage of the sort that used to be more common on DVDs but we don't see so much any more: it's literally just scenes being shot, on set, with the POV far back enough that we can see the crew as well as the action. Without any narration, it quietly demonstrates just how practical every thing was, from the cannon fire between ships to the giant waterslides that poured rain on everyone. Storyboards and a vintage trailer are also selectable.

A section called “interviews” mashes up full sit-down interviews with Harlin, Modine, and Davis with chopped-to-bits, EPK-ready soundbites from the set as uttered by Davis, Modine, and Langella. A modern disc would probably separate them – here they're all spliced in one continuous take.

The modern featurettes, on the other hand, really drop some knowledge. “Making” discusses all the hurdles the film faced from the get-go and beyond, and fills in the troubled history of the movie. “Creating” looks at the original screenplay and how it evolved, with writers James Gorman and Michael Frost Beckner. “Editing” offers up some real secrets from editor Danny Retz, who reveals some of his tricks that I'd never have noticed – and still barely can even with the knowledge! “Scoring” talks to composer John Debney, and helps one appreciate his (slightly overused) soundtrack, especially the parts with some surprise vocals!

“Ecce Pirate” is a black-and-white short film by Matthew Modine on set, utilizing the pirate extras to make an original tale that could certainly have doubled as an Alternative Nation music video. Actor Richard Leaf narrates, and he and Modine also offer a commentary track, which reveals it was the latter's way of working through his father's death and his own subsequent sense of mortality.

Finally, the packaging is aces – the steelbook is contained in a painted cel slipcover which, when removed, takes away the pirate skull's bandana and eyepatch, revealing the head map and our heroes reflected in an eye socket. It's clever, and fun for kids.

The movie's more flawed than I remember, though the action's as solid. But as an overall package, this set impresses with some important context and useful filmmaking lessons if you take them all in. So even if the feature's not all that substantial, it's brought to you with an ideal set of supplements. Perhaps if Harlin had personally supervised the 4K transfer, it'd be less grainy – but he didn't, and you can always play the Blu. You may not need Cutthroat Island on 4K, but if any of this sounds good to you, you'll probably appreciate Cutthroat Island on 4K.

It's now (theoretically; let’s be realistic here) available at Walmart.