The announcement of Bruce Willis’ retirement from acting due to medical reasons has led to many retrospectives on his body of work. One of the most notorious of his films was this one which shocked everyone at the time with how bad it was when Willis was at the height of his career. This eventually did gain something of a cult following with fans claiming that this is so bad that it crosses over into being good. I’ve long wanted to watch this out of curiosity and I’m sad to report that this is just a plain bad movie. You can see in some places how it could have been decent and the character of Hudson Hawk himself does have some charm. But what we actually got was still trash and there’s no redeeming it.

Notorious cat burglar Hudson Hawk is released from prison but even his parole officer wants to solicit him to carry out a new heist. A local Mafia family and the CIA are also involved. Under their pressure Hawk and his partner Tommy Messina eventually steal a horse sculpture from a local auction house, said to be made by Leonardo Da Vinci. The billionaire Mayflower couple turn out to be behind all of them and they actually want the crystals hidden inside three of Da Vinci’s artefacts to complete a machine that supposedly can turn lead into gold. They send Hawk to Rome to steal the next artefact from the Vatican museum. There he meets Anna Baragil who is actually an operative for the Vatican’s own spy agency. Despite their attraction to each other, Hawk manages to steal the Da Vinci Codex from under her nose.

The plot has Hawk careen from one adventure to another with little connective tissue between the scenes or any sense of realism. It’s ridiculous how Hawk has to fight so many groups of enemies that are all actually working for the Mayflowers. Even the CIA is seemingly working for them and in opposition to the Vatican and indeed the national governments of all those places they are stealing priceless artefacts from but that has no consequences at all. Hawk and Messina are okay enough as characters but all of the villains are so cartoonishly over-the-top that they’re not plausible as threats. Treating the whole thing as a joke might work if the gags were actually funny but they are mostly just sad and stupid. For example, they seem to have gone hog wild in the ideas department with making the CIA team follow a candy bar theme and so each team member has a unique schtick. But not one single gag lands and the villains come and go too quickly to leave much of an impression on the audience. It’s so much effort for no payoff at all.

There is some promise in the character of Hudson Hawk with his irreverent wisecracking and how he spends the whole movie trying to get a cappuccino. I also like how they time his movements during heists to music. But that’s pretty much it. After designing a look for the character with the hat and trench coat, they couldn’t even be bothered to ensure that he consistently looks cool in it. In many scenes the coat just hangs limply so he looks like an overdressed fool like anyone else who tries to go around in that kind of getup full time. My overall impression of the film is that they threw all kinds of crazy ideas at it but no one there owned it enough to throw out the things that didn’t work or simply ensure that execution is up to par. Despite having a generous budget for its time, this feels like such a lazily made film.

It looks like this was Willis’ one and only foray into scriptwriting as he never tried again after this failure. It was also a blight on the career of director Michael Lehmann who had previously impressed some critics with Heathers. In any case, this is a film that is best forgotten about the critics were right about it being a stinker the first time around.