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Cinematic Disasters: Hudson Hawk

A review by Brooks Rich

Oh God this film. Last time I did one of these I did the incredibly stupid but fun at the same time Congo. But I can't always cover fun films that are bad but worth a watch if you have a high tolerance for shit films. No today we have a not good on any level films. A film that is one of the most famous bombs of the '90s, 1991's Hudson Hawk.

This is a bad film. One of the worst most ill conceived comedies of all time. I have a high tolerance for some pretty bad films. Plus comedy is subjective. I understand that what some people find funny I myself may not. But this film is so unfunny and so poorly put together it's nearly unwatchable. Even with comedy being subjective, there's almost nothing worse than a comedy you don't find funny. The real tragedy is it's in the middle of a series of underperforming and poorly received for Willis, all coming after the release of Die Hard 2 and really only ending with the release of Pulp Fiction. It was not the best time for him. A shame really because Willis always had charisma, well usually, but he just couldn't pick a good project to save his life. He has no excuse for Hudson Hawk, which he had in a hand in creating. This was a passion project to some extent.

Willis played Eddie "Hudson Hawk" Hawkins, a cat burglar recently released from prison. He is blackmailed by a variety of annoying characters to steal objects all related to Leonard Da Vinci and alchemy and some damn thing, good god this movie is stupid. It's painful to watch.

So the big question is why did it fail? It was a box office bomb, making only 17 million of a 65 million dollar budget. It was critically shredded and rightfully so. The film is just too insane. It's going for slapstick and forgets one of the key elements of good slapstick comedy. You always need the straight men, the foil to those zany comedic characters. Everyone in here is just too insane and wacky and therefore everything feels stale and not funny. I would like to say Willis is trying at some points but I don't think I can. It comes across as a film where everyone was laughing and high fiving each other on set. They thought they were so funny. Wait, do you hear that laughter? Yeah neither do I.



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