Hudson Hawk

Bruce Willis plays a cat burglar nicknamed Hudson Hawk, freshly paroled and immediately strong-armed into stealing a Renaissance sculpture from an auction house. This is merely the appetizer. Before long, the CIA has shanghaied him to Rome to lift something from the Vatican. All of this is in service of a pair of eccentric billionaires who want to reassemble a Leonardo da Vinci machine that turns lead into gold.

Sure.

This is, of course, a mess. A glorious, infuriating, occasionally inspired mess. Willis produced it, conceived it, and apparently rewrote it on location while the budget doubled. The result should be a disaster, and yet, I had a blast.

The tone lands somewhere between European absurdist comedy and a Roger Moore Bond film directed by someone who had only read a description of a Roger Moore Bond film. That this was made by Americans suggests the absurdism may have been accidental. Whatever the cause, it commits.

The CIA operatives all go by code names of candy bars. An improvement, one explains, over the previous system: “Do you know what it’s like being called Chlamydia for a year?” David Caruso, then unknown, plays an agent who communicates exclusively through business cards. James Coburn turns up as their ringleader, and ends up doing karate against Willis.

Yes, that happens.

Richard E. Grant plays the megalomaniacal billionaire with the eyes of a man who has never once been told no. He threatens Hawk with the line, “I’ll torture you so slowly, you’ll think it’s a career,” delivering it like a child boasting of their report card. Sandra Bernhard plays his partner, and her abrasiveness, which has sunk lesser films, proves a perfect pairing with Grant’s absurdist turn.

Andie MacDowell wanders through as a Vatican operative who falls for Hawk, and she is good in a part that asks very little until a scene where, drugged, she speaks as a dolphin. I am not making this up.

The heist sequences are genuinely fun. Willis and Danny Aiello, as his partner, time their thefts by singing tunes from the Great American Songbook in harmony—“Swinging on a Star,” and the like. It’s charming in a way I can’t entirely account for.

Everything here rides on Willis, who was at the absolute peak of his stardom and knows it. He mugs, winks, grins, and plays the role of Bruce Willis playing someone named Hudson Hawk having the time of his life. Whether you find this irresistible or insufferable will determine your feelings about the entire enterprise. I found it irresistible.

And that’s the truth about Hudson Hawk: it is not really a heist film or a comedy or an action picture. It’s a hangout movie. Willis is the hang. If you like the hang, you’ll like the film. If you showed up for plot logic, character development, or a single moment of sincerity, you’re watching the wrong movie.