When prince Hercules learns of his real identity, he must choose to flee with his true love - Hebe, Princess of Crete - or to fulfill his destiny by overthrowing the tyrannical rule of the king and restoring peace to a land in hardship. From: IMDb.com
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Starring: Kellan Lutz, Gaia Weiss, Scott Adkins and others
At first, I had no real interest in this movie, once I noticed it was directed by Renny Harlin. Then I read about the true story this movie is based on and suddenly I was very interested in seeing it. However, I soon lost interest again, once I read that this was more or less a 'modern' update of the story, set in present time, using the found footage concept.
Seriously, using a found footage concept for your horror movie is just about the least creative and least effective thing you can do nowadays. It's all because everything has been done to death already and once you have seen one found footage horror movie, you have basically seen all of them already. 90% of them are constructed in the exact same manner and are as generic and predictable as can be. All suffer from the same weaknesses and problems as well and this movie also can't escape any of these problems.
But having said that, it still is absolutely far from the worst genre movie that I have ever seen. It's actually pretty good for what it is and if you're forced to watch one modern found footage flick, this isn't a bad one to pick. Nothing that's really all that recommendable about it but all things considering, this movie could have been a lot worse.
The movie never gets as creepy or intriguing as the true story it got based on, which all is due to the approach the movie is taking with its story. First of all, instead of letting things take place in 1959, it's a movie about an expeditions of young students, set in modern times, who try to find out what happened over 50 years ago to the group of Russian hikers, who all mysteriously ended up dead. It was a real disappointment for me to find out that rather than focusing on the actual group that ended up dead in 1959, this was going to be a movie about modern 'kids', involving the found footage genre. You would think that the original story would be strong and intriguing enough to base an entire movie around and I still believe the movie would have been a way better one if it indeed did so. In that regard I also really can't understand the film-makers and their decision to take such a different approach.
But oh well. It's just basically a modern found footage flick, like any other that's out there already. That means that it isn't any more worse than the average genre attempt but it also means that it suffers from all of the same problems, which similar modern genre movies often suffer from. Problem with the found footage genre is that you just know that for the first part of the movie nothing 'bad' or scary is going to happen. It's all buildup, when the young students start their investigation and travels through the Russian snowy mountains. You just know that the big 'reveal' isn't going to come, until the movie its final few minutes. You know you first have to muddle through a whole bunch of needless character development and exposition. Needless and pointless, since you never really get to know any of the character in these type of movies anyway and you know that most of the hints that get dropped lead to nothing and nowhere and will also have nothing to do with the eventual outcome of the movie.
But lets focus on some of the good things as well. The movie does indeed become a pretty good one, once things start to go wrong for its main characters. Sometimes the movie is pushing things a bit too far but at least it doesn't make the mistake to not show you anything and the movie actually does have a pretty decent payoff, unlike most other genre movies, that too often have big cop-out endings.
I also liked how the movie tried to incorporate most of the theories hat exists about the deaths of the Russian hikers in this movie its story. It gives a nice and creative spin on things and besides provides the movie with plenty of variety and creativity.
A decent enough found footage flick, in my opinion.
"Cutthroat Island" has gotten an horrible reputation, due to the fact that this is the biggest box office loss of all time. The movie actually managed to make Carolco Pictures go bankrupt. The company who brought us pictures like the first three Rambo movies, "Total Recall", "Jacob's Ladder", "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", "Basic Instinct", "Total Recall" and "Stargate". It's actually in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest loss of money for a film company ever. In that regard it's pretty amazing that director Renny Harlin is still working in the business, on also fairly large movies.
But of course "Cutthroat Island" is far from the worst movie of all time. It's action packed fun non-sense, that is being pulled down as a movie by its script and wrong casting choices.
Of course director Renny Harlin wanted to cast his newly wed wife (and of course they are already divorced a couple of years later again) as the movie's main lead. It's not necessary that fact that a woman plays the main part in a pirate movie that makes it bad but it's the fact that Geena Davis isn't showing her greatest skills in this movie. The movie also isn't being helped by the lack of chemistry between Davis and Matthew Modine. But in his defense, he was a last minute addition to the cast, after several actors already declined the role. Frank Langella on the other hand goes deliciously over the top as the movie its ruthless main pirate villain. I guess he must have really had fun playing in this movie. To bad that none of the other actors really put any fun in their roles.
There lats perhaps one problem of the movie; it's too serious all. The movie was obviously an attempt to put new life into the pirate/swashbuckler genre. After the failure of this movie, the swashbuckler genre seemed pretty death, simply because no film company dared to make another pirate movie again, until "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl", which came an unexpected huge success.
The movie has a quite simplistic dark, serious color tone and atmosphere. Some more colors could had done wonders and would had made the movie a more interesting to watch. It now instead tries to be an hard entertaining action flick, with big stunts, explosions and fights but miraculously with no blood in it.
At its time this movie was really big because of its stunt work. It also was one of the most expensive movies of its time with an close to an 100 million dollar budget. This big budget can be seen back on the screen, since this movie is an almost non stop action flick, with constant chases and explosions. This however of course truly goes at the expense of the story. The movie actually features one of the most awesome looking explosions in movie history, toward the end of the movie. It's one of my all time favorite movie explosions. Yes, I'm weird.
It's story is way to simplistic and it's of course about a treasure hunt. The movie basically features all of the clichés the genre has to offer. It therefore is also predictable and perhaps even a bit tiresome to watch.
Basically the biggest reason why you should ever watch this movie is the musical score by John Debney and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Can you just imaging how bad this movie would had been without its musical score? I even dare to say that it is the very musical score which is the reason why this still is a watchable movie. It certainly is a reason for me to watch this movie once every few years. The score is totally overblown yes but it's oh so brilliant and sweeping. It's actually pretty funny how in some sequences absolutely nothing interesting or spectacular is happening but the musical score still manages to make it sound as if the most exciting and biggest thing in movie history is happening on screen.
Yes it's a very well watchable movie, that perhaps is also better than the reputation given to it but it's also way too flawed to call this a great one as well.
