Digging up the long buried pirate genre may have seemed like a jolly old wheeze - all that romping about on galleons, splicing of the main sail, shrieking "Oooh Arrr!" and hoisting the Jolly Roger - and Renny Harlin and co. have valiantly thrown plenty of cash, bang and wallop in its direction.
The results, however, are mixed. Harlin has made a full-blooded escapist yarn that hurtles along at breakneck pace, exploding everything in its wake. But he's done it with a plot that could just about fill the back of an armband, acting that challenges the ship figureheads for flexibility and a creaking sense that such simplistic nostalgia belongs in a bygone age. There is one modernistic stance: the lead role, pirate offspring Morgan Adams, is played by Geena Davis. The rest of it is rum old nonsense.
A treasure map, tattooed on a scalp, a wry compatriot in Modine, Frank Langella's enthusiastically growling baddie, storms, battles, and oodles of booty. Without a moment's conviction, in a pair of magnificent purpose-built vessels the good pirates (led by Davis, who appears to be reading lines off an auto-cue) head for the titular, treasure laden island, chased by the bad pirates (led by Langella; in a nice twist, Davis' uncle).
The film is at its best in the gorgeous locations (Thailand masquerading as the Caribbean, and looking like Thailand) and the huge (we're talking Harlin - Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger - huge) set-pieces, concluding in a wild sea battle that is more John Woo on water than Captain Blood. As soon as folks stop to chat it all falls apart. Modine and Davis' love affair is a joke, and what motivates one gang of scallywags over another is never bothered with.
Yet for its many shortcomings, Cutthroat is an enjoyable, childish folly; dumbly rewarding on the momentum-over-sophistication scale. Its abject failure in America - the film's belly flop finally scuppered production house Carolco - may have consigned the pirate epic to Davy Jones' locker. But then, they said that about Pirates.