I never used to understand the hatred for THE BIG BRAWL – that’s the first Chan movie I remember seeing, so I thought it was great. He has a bunch of goofy fights, is involved in a huge rollerskate race, does gymnastics on some high up metal bars just to show off, and like most Robert Clouse movies it has a hell of a theme song:

But years later, after seeing a whole bunch of the much better movies that Chan made both before and after that one, I re-watched it and it didn’t hold up very well. He does get to use chairs as weapons and things like that, but he fights alot of non martial artists so the choreography’s not as good as it can be, he doesn’t do many of the bigger stunts and the humor of the movie (not just his) is really broad. So I get it now.

When I watched POLICE STORY I started to get curious about THE PROTECTOR, though. They mention in the extras that Chan didn’t get to do what he wanted on that movie and that’s why he went back to Hong Kong and directed POLICE STORY.

The director is James Glickenhaus, and THE PROTECTOR begins in the same type of sleazy New York hellscape where his vigilante movie THE EXTERMINATOR took place. It’s night, there are things on fire, there are three little people wearing some type of mixed up period costumes, and some ROAD WARRIOR type post-apocalyptian punks stop a semi and steal a shipment of computers. Billy (Chan) and his partner Michael (Patrick James Clarke) are cops who happen to come across the aftermath and talk to the driver. I’m not sure the significance of this scene but it’s weird because the driver is laying on the street and starts begging for his life when he sees Michael’s gun. Instead of saying “It’s okay, we’re police officers,” Michael slowly walks toward him with his gun out, then lifts the poor guy by the front of his shirt, then tells him they’re cops. Then makes fun of him for stopping for a red light in the South Bronx.

This gratuitous assholeishness seems like maybe a setup that Michael is a crooked cop, but no. He’s actually the Partner Who Dies At the Beginning. The two go to a bar to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Billy in the U.S., and Billy happens to be taking a piss when a gang of coked out creeps comes in to rob the place. One weird touch: the late Michael is carrying around a stuffed monkey doll because he was worried it would get stolen if he left it in the car. That’s how bad crime is, there are punks and creeps going around stealing stuffed animals from cars, maybe selling them to hospital and zoo gift shops for drug money. That’s the kind of world Paul Kersey was trying to avoid living in.

After this scene you’d assume the movie’s gonna be about catching or killing the guy that got Billy’s partner, but that actually happens in the first action scene. There’s a big foot-to-speedboat chase. Billy does a great move that’s more like the stupidest American movies than the Hong Kong ones: a helicopter drops a rope to him, he climbs out and somehow knows he can aim his commandeered-from-an-innocent-civilian speedboat for the bad guy’s boat and that the second they touch the other boat will explode into flames.

I read a true crime book one time where a police detective spotted and apprehended a bank robber while he was driving to a ceremony to receive a medal for having caught a different bank robber. The book argued that some cops just seem to have this uncanny ability to be at the right place at the right time. This also applies to all cops in movies. Billy and his new partner (Danny Aiello) are at a fashion show when thugs with uzis and ski masks smash through the skylights and kidnap a rich guy’s daughter. So our boys have to go to Hong Kong to try to get her back. That’s why he’s THE PROTECTOR, because he’s, you know, rescuing someone, which is similar to protecting them I guess.

In Hong Kong Billy and his ‘Nam vet partner do their investigation, go to a bathhouse, etc. They make the mistake of getting some naked girls to give them massages. Turns out they work for the Triads or whoever so it’s a massage with a non-Hollywood ending, and Aiello ends up running in his boxers to get his gun out of a locker.

One weird part in this scene is when Aiello sees the face-hole on the massage bench he says “I remember these holes when they were a little smaller, ha ha ha.” He’s talking about gloryholes, right? Too much information there, buddy.

Eventually they team up with an ex-Navy SEAL American expat and a girl, etc. Billy does a pretty amazing motorcycle jump onto a boat, and some pole vaulting between different boats. The bad guys have a henchman who it’s mentioned is an ex-karate champ, and fortunately they follow action movie law and have Billy eventually have a big fight with the champ. At first their fight seems disappointingly straightforward, but eventually Jackie starts using objects he finds and climbing onto stacks of crates to fight different guys.

Like many movies (including recent ones like MERANTAU and HANNA) there’s a climactic action scene that takes place between shipping crates. The original part is that inside one of the shipping crates is a hidden drug lab. A team of naked women climb up a ladder to the lab where they grow melons and hide coke inside them. It’s not a seedy lab, it’s a cool one like they’d have in a James Bond movie or ENTER THE DRAGON.

Glickenhaus (or the producers, or whoever) obviously didn’t get Jackie Chan. His popularity came not just because he was great at fighting and stunts but also from his humor and the boyish personalities of his characters. He had already figured out to stop trying to be an invincible Bruce Lee and instead be a fuck up. But for THE PROTECTOR they tried to turn him into Dirty Harry. They have him grimacing and shooting people and about the only joke he gets to make is a goofy face when he steps in a hot bath during a chase.

It’s weird, they even have him cursing. It’s funny to hear Jackie saying “fuckin”, “asshole” and “shit.” I guess for the Hong Kong version Jackie took out the swearing. He also made the movie shorter, re-edited the final fight, and reshot the scene to put clothes on the naked girls! I’m against it.

I think there’s a small mistake in the way they present his action scenes, too. When he runs up a wall or a fence they put it in slo-mo. He does those little parkour moves all the time, but I think it’s the effortlessness that makes it so amazing. He does it so quickly and gracefully. It flies past your eye and you think “holy shit.” When it goes in slow motion though I think it’s not as impressive.

So there are some problems with THE PROTECTOR, but I think it’s not nearly as bad as its reputation says. It’s shot well, nice production values, with some weird touches for flavor (naked girls cutting open melons, little people dressed as pirates). And while it’s not up there with his best Hong Kong movies it does have several stunts that you would never see in a normal American movie, like all the jumping between boats and the crazy scene at the end where he’s standing on a metal platform lifted up by a crane and a guy throws boxes at him and he jumps over them like Mario jumping a barrel.

If you forget about it being a Chan vehicle and instead hold it up against the Cannon movies and stuff like that it’s actually a pretty good example of the cops ‘n chopsockie type genre. Unfortunately it happened to come out in a particularly crazy time for action movies and I think really it’s being held up to those that kept it from catching on. I looked up what other action movies were released in the U.S. in 1985, and here’s the list I came up with:

AMERICAN NINJA, CODE OF SILENCE, COMMANDO, DEATH WISH 3, GOTCHA!, GYMKATA, INVASION USA, THE LAST DRAGON, MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME, MISSING IN ACTION 2: THE BEGINNING, RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART 2, RED SONJA, REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., A VIEW TO A KILL, YEAR OF THE DRAGON.

When you look at it that way you realize how fuckin nuts the action cinema was at that point in time. So many of these are memorable for their excesses or ludicrousness. Obviously COMMANDO is a classic with comic book exaggeration, DEATH WISH 3 is the most over-the-top vigilante movie of all time, GYMKATA is about a gymnast fighting mentally ill people to death on a mysterious island, INVASION U.S.A. is the most ridiculous (and enjoyable) Chuck Norris movie I’ve seen, THE LAST DRAGON is full of weird touches that would never happen at any other time in our cultural history, RAMBO is the living embodiment of ’80s action movie stupid-macho, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. is the most artfully made on the list by a mile but it’s all about ‘85 Los Angeles phoniness, wang chunging and spectacular car chases. CODE OF SILENCE is one of the classier Norris movies, but it still has a robot in it. Shit, 1985 was even excessive in the amount of roles it gave to Chuck Norris – he’s got three on there. Also I figure it’s more of a drama but ROCKY IV came out that year, and it fits right onto that list as far as pure 1985ness. It had a robot too, it had communism, it had James Brown in a red white and blue sequined outfit,  it gave the world Dolph Lundgren.

So you can see how in that context THE PROTECTOR could be underwhelming. Compared to many of its type THE PROTECTOR has alot of mayhem and crazy stunts, but compared to most other action of the time it was tame in content and attitude. It had a hard time living up to Chan’s Hong Kong movies or America’s ridiculousness of the time.

And so it goes. But it was for the better. Maybe if this had been a huge hit like RUSH HOUR he would’ve been doing THE SPY NEXT DOOR by 1990.

The year was 1994 and American crime movies were having sort of a resurgence. Young men with movie cameras were reading the Psalms of John Woo and rediscovering the joys of onscreen bullet discharge. It was the year of KILLING ZOE, THE LAST SEDUCTION, FRESH, the Alec Baldwin version of THE GETAWAY and of course DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH.

Oh yeah, and PULP FICTION. Tarantino also had his script turned into NATURAL BORN KILLERS that year, and TRUE ROMANCE the year before. Most of the attention justifiably went to him, and he took any chance he could get to wax on about his influences in Hong Kong cinema and the French New Wave and whatever else he was talking up back then. But coming along on this same cultural wave was Frenchman Besson, who had his own type of international sensibilites (which is how over the years he ended up producing English language movies for French directors starring Jet Li or Jason Statham or even Bruce Willis, having his finger in importing Tony Jaa, exporting parkour. Bringing the different parts of the world closer together.

(Hey, this is weird – Besson was a producer on THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA and I LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS. I did not know that.)

So LEON is I think his version of an American action/crime movie. It even opens with a camera flying over the water toward New York, as if saying “Follow me, countrymen, to a magical land where the mafia does battle.” It zeroes in in on New York, into LIttle Italy, into this specific building where Danny Aiello is meeting with the elite hitman Leon (Jean Reno).

Leon accepts the job of assassinating a crime boss who’s been fucking up. We don’t see Leon clearly yet, he’s a mysterious presence, but he doesn’t mind giving his prey forewarning by letting the doorman call upstairs to them. Now they know he’s out there, they’re looking for him, waiting for him to arrive. They watch the lights on the elevator the way the Colonial Marines in ALIENS watch their meters as the aliens get closer.

I think Besson is sometimes considered schlocky now, but this is not the work of a schlocky director. This is the work of a guy who loves storytelling. He gives his guy a great entrance, he makes him mythic, he develops suspense, and alot of this he does through visual style, moving the camera around methodically to tell you this guy is over here, this guy is down here, soon they will meet and bullets will fly.

On the job Leon works like Batman, appearing and disappearing from shadows, hanging upside down from the ceiling, making his enemies quiver in fear. His Batman even has a Joker, but he looks like Commissioner Gordon. Gary Oldman plays Stansfield, the maniacal, pill-popping thug who leads a crew in gunning down an entire family and then (SPOILER) turns out to be a cop. It’s a classic piece of mega-acting. I hadn’t seen this in years and remembered him being over-the-top alot more than he actually is, but the character has a few scenes where he goes into such overload that there oughta be sparks popping off his brain out his nostrils. His eyes turn Nic Cage, he screams, he plays air piano. My favorite Gary Oldman moment is the overhead shot of him cracking his neck and shoulders as he enjoys his pills. It seems like he’s making a transformation into a bizarre lizardman or something.

But back to Leon. With his sunglasses on he obviously means business. He terrifies hardened criminals into compliance. But on his own he’s a goofball. He watches Gene Kelly movies with a look of little boy joy on his face. He doesn’t like swearing or smoking, and usually doesn’t drink alcohol, but always a glass of milk. He owns an oven mitt made to look like a pig. But that’s not his badass juxtaposition – I think that would be the potted plant that he carries with him every time he has to move to another hotel. It’s like it’s his pet.

Leon lives in the same apartment building as Mathilda, played by 12 year old rookie and now Academy Award winner Natalie Portman (R-Naboo). She’s a tiny little girl with a hip hair do (similar to Uma Thurman in PULP FICTION) who smokes cigarettes, talks tough and happens to be out buying milk when Stansfield guns down the aforementioned family – hers. She knocks on Leon’s door and he lets her in, saving her life. When she finds out his line of work she wants to hire him to avenge the death of her little brother (not the rest of the family, who she doesn’t give a shit about). She can’t afford him though so instead she starts working for him, like how you wash the dishes to pay for the food you couldn’t afford.

So it’s a sweet story about a hitman teaching a little orphan girl how to murder people. Okay, now that I’m typing it out I realize it’s kind of creepy. Try not to think about the DC sniper while you watch it.

Now days a little girl with a gun would be used for easy laughs (see KICK-ASS) but it’s got kind of a tragic feel here. Yes, we root for her to get violent revenge, yes, it’s kind of cute that little Natalie (who does not appear to have grown up on the streets or anything) smokes and tries to talk tough. But she’s obviously kind of broken. It’s upsetting.

I saw this movie many years ago and I remember liking it, but I didn’t remember how childlike this Leon is. Watching it this time I had to wonder is he supposed to be mildly retarded? Or maybe autistic? He’s obviously very good at what he does. But it seems to me like Danny Aiello found him, figured out that he was a great killer, but also that he’s not quite there, and he took advantage of that. The way he talks to him it’s like they’re very close and he’s helping him out but I don’t think he’s really helping him out. He’s “keeping his money” supposedly but I think he’s kind of turned this poor slow fellow into an indentured servant without him knowing it.

So it’s a sad movie, but it also has a dark sense of humor, especially in the characterization of the bad guys. I like the white guy with dreadlocks who’s impressed to find a Burning Spear record in Mathilda’s apartment, and who un-self consciously uses the word “bumbaclot.”

Besson draws you into the odd world of Leon and Mathilda and puts you squarely on their side. Yeah, they’re doing bad shit, but they’re doing it to scumbags. They’re good people, it seems like. So when shit comes to a head you’re very invested in their safety.

The gun battles are great, full of artful property damage and illustrated clearly, with the occasional show-offy camera shot that serves to emphasize the action instead of obscure it like they do now. There’s a great shot from the POV of a small rocket. Stylistically it kind of reminds me of the Wachowski brothers in BOUND. Maybe it was an influence on them. They tried to get Reno to play Agent Smith in THE MATRIX but the poor sucker chose to do GODZILLA instead. That might have been a mistake, in my opinion.

You wanna hear some more Jean Reno trivia? Check this shit out. At one of his weddings his best men were Johnny Hallyday from VENGEANCE and then-French-Interior-Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. I bet they met in the green room of some talk show.

I like some of the Besson productions but they’re usually lacking in some area or another. This one delivers in all departments, from acting to characters to carnage, and it’s all orchestrated just right. I really like this movie. I wondered if it would hold up and actually I think it was a little better than I remembered.

But I really can’t write about LEON without addressing the elephant in the room with the words “What’s the deal, France?” painted on the side in circus font (see diagram). When I saw this a decade ago it was the 14 minutes shorter American cut called THE PROFESSIONAL, and I remember it creeped me out that this little girl is in love with this adult she lives with in hotels, and he doesn’t seem to mind.

I mean I know it’s innocent. He doesn’t do anything, and I think of him as a guardian, a better father figure than the real one that beat her all the time (and who knows – maybe molested her considering some of these ideas she has). But the problem is Leon never tells her “No, I’m an adult. Don’t talk to me like that.” He just brushes her off and gets embarrassed. When she wants to kiss him in the restaurant, for example, he says that people are watching. As if it might be okay if they weren’t.

And that was the version that was cut because they knew Americans wouldn’t go for that shit. This time I watched the longer version, which includes a scene where Mathilda comes in with a dress and makeup and tries to get Leon to be her first. It’s kind of funny the way she has these big ideas about adult things she doesn’t understand. She’s had to grow up fast, getting beat, seeing her family massacred, becoming a murderer herself, but she really is just a little girl. She just doesn’t know it.

So I still like the movie alot, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t nag at me. It’s just too convenient as a pedophile fantasy where he’s honorable and doesn’t do anything but this girl throws herself at him. And he might be tempted, we don’t know. The 10 year reunion DVD/blu-ray extra doesn’t help any. There’s a woman who’s apparently in the movie who explains that she met Luc Besson when she was 12 and dated him when she was 15 and she says “this is my story.” And the producer says it’s okay just because Besson directed Jean Reno to think of his character as being 14 years old.

Plus Natalie Portman mentions some of the things her parents had them cut out of the script, including a scene where he accidentally comes in when she’s in the shower and she exposes herself to him. I mean, that would’ve been in there if it was up to Besson.

So all that’s kinda troubling. On the other hand, you have grown up Portman interviewed on there and unlike so many child stars she has clearly grown into this intelligent, thoughtful adult, and she sounds so heartfelt and eloquent talking about her love for the story, the characters, the experience of making it, and everybody involved from Besson to Reno to the costume designer to her parents. So it’s harder to think of the movie as sleazy when the 12 year old girl in the middle of it all clearly turned out fine. And has an Oscar.

I’ll start by laying out the three basic schools of thought about why HUDSON HAWK crashed and burned.

1. The McClane Factor. Audiences had originally loved Bruce as David Addison on MOONLIGHTING. Nobody expected DIE HARD to be so good. But it re-invented action and it re-invented Bruce. Sure, they still had a taste for David Addison, but they hungered for John McClane, especially right here in 1991. Moonlighting was over, DIE HARD 2 had just happened, Comedy Bruce had been shed to reveal Action Bruce fully grown beneath… then all the sudden he comes out with this. It’s like, all due respect to the black eye mask, but right after you see THE BIG BOSS or FIST OF FURY for the first time you’re not anxious for Bruce Lee to go back to playing Kato.

HUDSON HAWK is way more MOONLIGHTING than DIE HARD. His character is the opposite of John McClane in many ways. McClane is a cop, Hawk is a cat burglar. McClane is a working stiff, Hawk loves cappucino. McClane wears an undershirt and no shoes, Hawk a fancy black overcoat and hat. McClane makes smartass comments to leaven his seemingly doomed situation, when Hawk makes them it emphasizes his fearlessnes. McClane is having trouble keeping his marriage together, Hawk is so smooth he scores a hot nun. If you went into this movie hoping to see a character kind of like John McClane you would feel a little like Karl hanging from a chain.

2. The media was out to get Bruce. This seems to be Bruce’s theory. Some of the critics and other media establishment individuals weren’t onboard the Nakatomi Express yet. They looked down their noses at DIE HARD, especially after there was a sequel. They thought it was low culture, dumb violence for dumb people. So they wanted Bruce to fall on his ass, and this obviously self-indulgent pet project with a cocky attitude and shameless silliness was too juicy a target to pass up. It was panned viciously and that may have contributed to its financial failure.

3. It wasn’t very good.

Which of these is the real reason? I have always believed it was a Neopolitan ice cream style striped-combo of the three. But after my latest viewing I put less emphasis on the third one. I think I’ve seen it three times now, and each time liked it better than before. Admittedly it started at a pretty low level of liking, but this time was the best so far. It doesn’t all work, but if you’re in the right mood it’s funny and unusual.

Bruce plays Eddie something, aka the Hudson Hawk, or I thought that’s what they said but at some point they seem to switch to Hudson Hawk being his actual name. Anyway he’s a very talented cat burglar just out of the joint, relaxing and discussing a straight career path with his brother and co-bar owner Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello) when some crooks called the Mario Brothers (no relation) force them to do a museum heist. This turns out to be a setup by nefarious CIA man James Coburn and a team of younger agents (he calls them “the MTV-IA”) code-named after candy bars.

In the movie’s most perfectly surreal moment he’s just survived a harrowing high speed gurney-roll through freeway traffic when David Caruso rappels down from who knows where and holds out a card that says, “MY NAME IS KIT KAT. THIS IS NOT A DREAM.” Next thing you know the Hawk is poisoned, packed in styrofoam shipping peanuts and flown to Rome where he’s forced to steal Leonardo Da Vinci’s codex from the Vatican. In the process he falls for a pretty girl (Andie McDowell) who’s trying to keep the Vatican’s artifacts safe, and he turns out to be embroiled in an evil plot to rebuild a hidden Da Vinci invention that creates gold (not because they want to be rich but because they want to destroy the world economy).

Jesus, I gotta add theory #4, that the movie failed because these were the fucking movie posters they made:

That stupid one on the left I remember as the poster but also I found this one on the right, which says:

Shy.
Sensitive.
Law-abiding.
Polite.
Respectful.
–I don’t think so.

For Christ’s sake, man. I know somebody probly worked hard at least on the typography there on one of them, and everybody has bills to pay. Don’t want to make anybody feel bad, but come on. Let’s have some pride in our work, fellas. I personally believe you could’ve done better. just my 2 cents.

The screenplay was credited to two writers, Steven E. de Souza (the E is for Excellence [nah, just kidding, it's so he doesn't get confused with all the other Steven de Souzas]) and Daniel Waters. De Souza is famous for being one of the writers of DIE HARD, and his credits also include 48 HOURS, COMMANDO and RICOCHET. But also THE FLINSTONES, BEVERLY HILLS COP 2-3, STREET FIGHTER (also director), JUDGE DREDD, and as much as I love it I gotta say KNOCK OFF. Waters meanwhile is known as the visionary writer of HEATHERS, but also had a streak of big studio movies: THE ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE, then this, BATMAN RETURNS and DEMOLITION MAN. My guess is that de Souza wrote the thing up based on Bruce and his friend Robert Kraft’s story notes, then Waters probly went in and rewrote all the dialogue.

The weak side of it is the summer event movie side of it. It has that early ’90s mediocre studio fantasy adventure feel, with effects by ILM (for a Da Vinci flying machine and exploding gold machine) and a score working itself up too much trying to sound epic and thrilling no matter what’s on screen. If this was supposed to work on multiple levels I don’t think the fantasy adventure level quite succeeded. Bruce does too much swinging around and falling with comical looks on his face for the action to have any weight to it, and Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard are too campy and over the top as the villains to be taken seriously at all.

I mean I’m just saying I doubt anybody’s watching this thing excited to get to the flying machine sequence.

But as a comedy it’s much more successful because it’s jam-packed with goofy little touches (a bomb shooting onto a thug’s head, Caruso painted silver and disguised as a statue) and a Shane Blackian amount of quips. Everybody always has a smartass comment to rattle off to everybody else’s smartass comment. They’re even making clever quips when they claim that they can’t make clever quips. At one point Coburn says, “I wish I could come up with this glib repartee the way you guys can. But I can’t, so I’ll just paralyze you.”

And glib is just the right word for it. Everybody jokes to cover any fear of death they may have. When they’ve been paralyzed and shown a shocking USA Today cover story Hawk and Tommy try to get them to turn to section B to check the Mets score.

I’m sure some of you will quote your favorite lines in the comments. Here’s a couple of mine:

Asked how much time he did Hawk says, “Put it this way. I never saw E.T.”

Richard E. Grant The butler guy slashes the mobster and says, “So much for his cut.” Then, “Forgive my dry British humor.”

The moronic Butterfinger thinks he’s in France (he’s in Italy) and announces, “Ah, to be in Par-ee and in love!”

Also, one of the most ridiculous one-liners ever, after somebody gets beheaded: “I guess you won’t be going to that hat  convention in July!”

(why July? Hudson Hawk really has a detailed idea of this imaginary hat convention. I’m surprised he didn’t say where it happens and how much it costs for a VIP badge.)

I like the candy bar agents, a colorful bunch of characters. The standout is Butterfinger, a huge, dumb oaf with a Boz-like haircut. When part of a plan is going awry he asks, “You want me to rape him?” so they distract him with his copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. When he’s shot he calls Coburn “coach.” Then there’s the mute Kit Kat. As he falls over dead thankfully he has a card prepared that says, “I ALWAYS LIKED YOU.”

If you’re like me, the main thing you remember about this movie is the heist sequence at the beginning, where Hawk and Tommy sing “Would You Like To Swing On a Star” to themselves while sneaking around the museum, because they have the lengths of songs memorized and use them to time their movements. Of course this makes no sense at all, and Tommy even points it out (”You know they invented something while you were inside – it’s called ‘the watch’”). But if you just go with it it makes for a fun little musical number. Aiello actually isn’t a bad singer and Bruce does better than on RETURN OF BRUNO.

This actually has a bit of that Bruno in it, because it’s Bruce indulging his white bluesman sensibilities, showing off what songs he loves and thinking he looks real fuckin cool adjusting that hat all the time.

What I didn’t know until I watched the DVD extra “The Story of Hudson Hawk” is that this movie comes entirely out of Bruce’s music-playing. It’s actually a really good half hour featurette of Bruce and co-story writer/music supervisor Robert Kraft. Kraft is at the piano for the whole interview and plays and sings the theme song much more appealingly than Dr. John did on the end credits. They explain that they met in 1979 when Kraft’s band was performing in a club. Bruce was in the audience and was presumptuous enough to pull out a harmonica and start playing with them. You’d think this would get Bruce beat up, but instead they became friends. Later Kraft wrote the song, Bruce vowed it would be a movie some day, many years passed and then somehow he turned out to be right.

So for Bruce fans this is a must-see, because it shows you so much of Bruce’s personality. It captures his wiseass side, his musical persona, a little bit of his action side, his Jersey pride and his friendship with Kraft. It shows that as much as we love Action Bruce it’s not a bad idea to invite Comedy Bruce out every once in a while. This movie has really grown on me over the years, from “not very good” to “actually has some funny parts” to “for the most part I like this!”

a couple notes:

1. I don’t know why they’re making such a big deal about Willis and Stallone working together on THE EXPENDABLES, because they already worked together on this one. Well, Frank Stallone, anyway.

2. This was not the first time Bruce collaborated with Kraft on a movie. Kraft wrote a song for LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO.

3. IMDb’s database recommends that if I like HUDSON HAWK I may also like Jodorowsky’s HOLY MOUNTAIN and BLUE STREAK starring Martin Lawrence.

[ratings]