Tales That Defy the Ordinary

Film, culture, history, and nostalgia — examined, questioned, explored. Glimpses of science, mind, body, and nature, diving into the curious corners of life. Jackdaw Posts: Part blog, part magazine.

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Cutthroat Island (1995): The Treasure Map to Nowhere

The sea is wide, the treasure is buried. And Geena Davis is swinging on a rope like she’s auditioning for Errol Flynn’s understudy in a shampoo commercial. Hollywood thought it had found pirate gold. Instead, it sank a studio, scarred careers, and proved that pirates in mid-90s America were as welcome as a shark at a kiddie pool.

 

Cutthroat Island movie poster featuring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine, and pirate adventure chaos
 

Cutthroat Island, the $100 million treasure that went down with all hands. Poster by Drew Struzan

The Golden Age of Piracy (or, How to Burn $100 Million on Rum and Gunpowder)

By the mid-90s, Hollywood was bored of action heroes with mullets and machine guns. Enter Renny Harlin, the Finnish dynamo who blew up planes (Die Hard 2) and mountains (Cliffhanger). His pitch: pirates. Not the grim, scurvy-ridden kind with rotting teeth and syphilis, but Hollywood pirates — swashbuckling, witty, dangerous in a family-friendly way.

The problem? Nobody wanted pirate movies in 1995. The last hit was decades earlier. The genre was as dead as Blackbeard’s head on a spike. Still, Carolco Pictures — the cocaine-fuelled studio behind Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct — bet everything on it.

It was their final voyage. And like most desperate final voyages, it ended with sharks.

The Plot (or, X Marks the Mess)

Davis plays Morgan Adams, a pirate with a map tattooed in pieces across the backs of family members (don’t ask). Matthew Modine tags along as a charming thief with a ponytail that screams “mid-90s shampoo commercial.” Together they fight Frank Langella’s evil pirate Dawg Brown, who chews scenery as though he’s been starved at sea.

There are sword fights, cannon blasts, exploding ships — all the right ingredients. But like a bad stew, they’re dumped in the pot without seasoning.

What Works (The Fleeting Glimmers of Treasure)

  • The Visuals: Sweeping ocean shots and daring action sequences hint at the pirate epic that could have been. The camera sometimes fights the chaos and wins.

  • Frank Langella: Delicious villainy, snarling like a Shakespearean drunk on rum. He knows he’s in a doomed movie and decides to enjoy the wreckage.

  • The Practical Effects: Ships built full-size, explosions real, stunt work brutal. Today it would all be green screen sludge.

What Fails (The Leaks in the Hull)

  • The Script: Feels like it was written by parrots pecking at a typewriter. No wit, no spark. Just clichés strung together with rigging rope.

  • The Editing: At 124 minutes, it drags like an anchor.

  • The Tone: Unsure if it’s a kids’ adventure or a bloody pirate epic. Ends up being neither.

  • Matthew Modine’s Hair: A crime against follicles.

The Curse of Carolco

Cutthroat Island wasn’t just a flop. It was the flop. Costing around $100 million, it earned barely $10 million back. Carolco went bankrupt. Careers drowned. Geena Davis — once Oscar-winning, bankable, unstoppable — struggled to recover.

The real curse? It killed pirate films for nearly a decade. No one dared touch the genre until Disney rolled the dice with Pirates of the Caribbean (2003). Johnny Depp turned eyeliner into box office gold, but he was standing on the bones of Harlin’s sunken dream.

The Soundtrack: Hornpipes for the Damned

John Debney’s score is heroic, sweeping, and entirely too good for this wreck. Listening to it without the film, you’d think you were in for a classic seafaring adventure. Paired with the movie, it’s like a symphony wasted on a drunk tavern fight.

Verdict

Cutthroat Island is not a good movie. It’s not even “so bad it’s good.” It is, however, a spectacle of ambition gone rogue—a masterclass in hubris, a cautionary tale of what happens when Hollywood tries to buy the sea. Watch it for cannon fire, palm trees, Frank Langella devouring every plank in sight, and Geena Davis swinging like she means it while the plot quietly plots mutiny. Expect no treasure, only the lingering scent of ambition scorched by studio accounting.

4/10. A treasure map that leads straight to Davy Jones’ Locker, past the jagged reefs where studios go to die, and into the brine where unclaimed ambition festers, still rattling in its rusted chest.

 


Fancy a masterclass in how to sink $100 million without a trace? That’s Cutthroat Island (1995) — the film so bad it buried pirate movies for a decade. We gave it a merciful 4/10, but hey, maybe you like watching slow-motion shipwrecks.

👉 Watch Cutthroat Island on Amazon:
[Amazon.com] | [Amazon.co.uk]

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