Bruce Willis – in the worst movie of his career – plays Eddie Hawkins (aka Hudson Hawk), a cat burglar just out of Sing Sing who wants to go straight but cannot adjust to the real world. Even his old saloon hangout is now a yuppie bar serving brandied goat cheese pizza.
Somehow he gets framed – by the CIA, the Vatican, and a gang of arch-fiends who count frequent flier mileage points like blue-chip stocks – into stealing three long-lost artefacts by Leonardo da Vinci commissioned by the Duke of Milan in 1481.
Willis performs the task with the aid of his old pal Danny Aiello while they sing and dance to Frank Sinatra‘s big-band arrangement of Swingin’ on a Star.
Then he gets stuck in a runaway ambulance careening across the Triborough Bridge, and when his stretcher lands in a box full of styrofoam he wakes up in Rome tortured by crooks named after diseases and is seduced by Andie MacDowell, who may or may not be a nun doing undercover work for the Pope, who watches Francis the Talking Mule movies on closed-circuit Vatican TV.
Sometimes she’s in a nun’s habit, sometimes she’s French kissing and showing her G-spots.
Nothing is clear except that the master criminals are Darwin and Minerva Mayflower, played by Richard E Grant and Sandra Bernhard.
People get burned, stabbed, skewered in the eyes with hypodermic needles, blown to bits, and they all come back to life at the script’s convenience.
There’s a dog who munches Bruce Willis’s privates, and when all else fails, the movie returns to 1481 for a look at Da Vinci’s medieval Mel Brooks iron factory where metal is transformed into gold.
Hudson Hawk (Eddie Hawkins)
Bruce Willis Anna Baragli
Andie MacDowell Darwin Mayflower
Richard E Grant George Kaplan
James Coburn Tommy Five-Tone
Danny Aiello Minerva Mayflower
Sandra Bernhard Kit Kat
David Caruso Alfred
Donald Burton Snickers
Don Harvey Butterfinger
Andrew Bryniarski Almond Joy
Lorraine Toussaint Gates
Burtt Harris Cesar Mario
Frank Stallone Antony Mario
Carmine Zozzora Leonardo da Vinci
Stefano Molinari
Director Michael Lehmann
Related Posts
Alligator II: The Mutation (1991) Joseph Bologna stars as night shift cop David Hodges in what's basically a PG-13 remake of the original Alligator movie…
This Boy's Life (1993) This poignant adaptation of a Tobias Wolff memoir takes a realistic look at growing up in the 1950s. Leonardo DiCaprio…
Honeymoon Killers, The (1970) A true-crime movie about oily Spanish gigolo Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) and his enormous American nurse sidekick Martha Beck…
Hornets' Nest (1970) This WWII adventure stars Rock Hudson, with a moustache that ages him, as Captain Turner, paratrooper and demolition expert, who…
Die Hard: With A Vengeance (1995) The third Die Hard film became the highest grossing American film of 1995 and re-established the action franchise's reputation for…
Hot Rods To Hell (1967) Tom Phillips (Dana Andrews), his wife Peg (Jeanne Crain), their teenage daughter Tina (Laurie Mock) and little boy Jamie drive…
Armageddon (1998) Bruce Willis and an all-star cast of ragtag roughneck oil drillers blast off on a mission to save the planet…
Hot Rod Gang (1958) Clearly made for the drive-in movie crowd of the day, the AIP film Hot Rod Gang features John Abernathy III…
Nothing is clear except that the master criminals are Darwin and Minerva Mayflower, played by Richard E Grant and Sandra Bernhard.
