Fighting for the underdog: Hudson Hawk

Upon it's release in 1991, Hudson Hawk was generally regarded as an irredeemably stupid film. I have no intention of disputing this here - Hudson Hawk is most definitely irredeemably stupid. And there's no case to be made for it looking better in retrospect compared to other films of the time - 1991 also saw the release of The Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2, Barton Fink, JFK, and Thelma & Louise, all of them much more rewarding than Hudson Hawk.

However, I have a real fondness for films like this - cinematic follies that can only be the result of over-inflated egos colliding with a lot of money. They're often bad films, but they're rarely boring. And the toxic fumes from their box office failures are such that no-one ever sits around a studio boardroom musing 'you know what would be great? Another film like Hudson Hawk'. The net result being that these follies remain more often than not one of-a-kind films. The only place to go when you want to get that Hudson Hawk feeling is Hudson Hawk.

It was an out of control production with the storyline being re-written daily to accommodate the larger egos involved - mainly those of Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello. Surrounding these two forces of nature is a group of idiosyncratic actors - Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard, James Coburn, Andie McDowell - all deciding to hell with it, let's go for broke. And the whole thing helmed by Michael Lehmann, who'd made a couple of funny and smart independent films and here found himself in the deep end of big budget Hollywood film making. It's a mess and completely nonsensical, but it's best moments work on a kind of Looney Tunes level, and the interest level kicks up a bit whenever Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard are on screen as the villainous Mayflowers.

So if there's nothing else on telly and you feel like watching something fun and stupid, you could do worse. Like Men in Black II, for example.