| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) | Release Date: December 22, 1995 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
3
Mixed:
8
Negative:
9
|
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Critic Reviews
Cutthroat Island is everything a movie named Cutthroat Island should be, and no more. It is a pirate picture, pure and simple, and doesn't transcend its genre except perhaps in the luxurious production. Leaner and meaner pirate movies have worked more or less as well, but this one gets the job done.
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The boldest thing about Cutthroat Island may be the way it maintains a comic tone as it portrays him as her boy toy. Things get pretty waterlogged on the island, though. If there's a fresh way to photograph buried-treasure retrieval, Harlin hasn't discovered it. [22 Dec 1995, p.60]
If the sight of half-naked, tattooed sailors firing cannons at each other shivers your timbers, climb aboard. Even passable pirate movies don't sail by every day. [22 Dec 1995, p.3D]
Renny Harlin's big, chaotic pirate flick is best understood as an attempt to revive the waning career of his wife, Geena Davis, but he's done her no great favor. As Morgan Adams, a sort of distaff Errol Flynn, poor Geena gets lost in a hectic scenario that's littlemore than an excuse for a series of thunderous explosions, clanky sword battles and run-of-the-mill spectacular stunts.
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Cutthroat Island ranks up there with other ill-advised movies such as The Scarlet Letter and Waterworld. At least the Harlin-Davis opus is meant to be fun. [22 Dec 1995, p.12D]
A swashbuckler that plays like an over-dressed serial on a slow Saturday afternoon. [22 Dec 1995]
What seemed like a dubious proposition on paper plays even more dubiously onscreen, as Cutthroat Island strenuously but vainly attempts to revive the thrills of old-fashioned pirate pictures. Giving most of the swashbuckling opportunities to star Geena Davis, pic does little with its reversal of gender expectations and features a seriously mismatched romantic duo in Davis and Matthew Modine.
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Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction. The only serious incentive for seeing this spectacle is a fascination with extravagance, since Cutthroat Island is indeed scenic, hectic and big.
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It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie. Every cliffhanger is enough to make you a cliff jumper. Davis and Modine are almost transcendentally unappealing, as they weather dull sword fights, ship-to-ship exchanges and other action-movie banalities.
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Who thought letting Harlin steer into Captain Blood territory was a sage idea? To a piece that’s intended as a comic, tongue-in-cheek romp, he brings the same brutal, slo-mo pyrotechnics that lit up both his hits (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) and his biggest previous miss (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane). Somewhere, Errol Flynn is wincing.
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For all its derring-do, Cutthroat Island is sluggish, flat, tiresome. Watching it is like being stuck on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride for an endless two hours. [22 Dec 1995, p.4G]
Cutthroat Island isn't so much a movie as it is a burial at sea. As a longtime Geena Davis fan, I hope she won't go down with the ship. [22 Dec 1995, p.M10]
Director Renny Harlin and his writers, Robert King and Marc Norman, appear to have spent many hours watching bad pirate movies, and they seem determined to repeat every pieces-of-eight cliche. [22 Dec 1995, p.G8]
There's not much adventure on these high seas. This buccaneering boondoggle is more like a slow voyage aboard the PMS Pinafore. [22 Dec 1995, p.C06]
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