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In the movie industry, there are several films that have earned the dubious distinction of being one of the biggest flops of all time. Ishtar was such a film, as was Cutthroat Island, a $92 million dollar bomb that raked in just $10 million at the box office. The 1991 Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk has to be considered part of that club.

Hudson Hawk cost $65 million to make and was hyped as the first major blockbuster of the 1991 summer season. But the movie flopped with both critics and audiences alike. It was widely panned and made only $17 million during its U.S. release. I managed to avoid Hudson Hawk for 15 years, but decided to watch it this weekend just out of curiosity. After all, the actual movie couldn't be nearly as bad as everyone made it sound, right?

Boy, was I wrong! Sometimes the critics are dead-on in their assessment, and this was one of those occasions. Willis stars as Hudson Hawk, a highly skilled cat burglar who was recently released from the Sing-Sing penitentiary. The moment that he gets out, he is approached by a gang of mobsters headed up by the Mario Brothers. They blackmail him into stealing a horse statue that was crafted by Leonardo da Vinci. The statue is currently in an auction house and is scheduled to be sold to the highest bidder the next day, so Hudson Hawk has to move quickly.

He teams up with his buddy Tommy Five-Tone (played by Danny Aiello) and they map out a strategy for getting in and out of the auction house with the treasure. What makes these two guys unique is that they sing songs while they're committing their crimes. This apparently helps them keep track of time so they don't get nabbed by the security guards or the cops.

Hawk and Tommy successfully steal the da Vinci statue, and hand it over to the Mario Brothers. It turns out that it's not the statue itself they're after, but rather a piece of crystal that's hidden inside the statue. According to legend, the crystal is part of a mechanism that runs a special machine da Vinci devised during his lifetime. The machine supposedly was capable of turning lead to gold. This is something that evil couple Darwin and Minerva Mayflower (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard) want for themselves, and is part of their plan for "world domination." It's the Mayflowers who are actually pulling the strings behind the Mario Brothers, and they're the ones who end up with the crystal.

Are you confused yet? Well, that's not a good sign, as the plot just gets more twisted from there. There's another group after the crystals as well. They consist of a bunch of operatives named after candy bars, and they could be a secret arm of the CIA or they could just be another gang of crooks. And I suppose I should mention Andie MacDowell's character Anna Baragli. She starts off as an art appraiser, but is not really who she appears to be either.

As you can probably tell from the plot summary, Hudson Hawk is one mess of a movie. It is possible to follow the story as it plays out on the screen, but it's just not very interesting. There are so many double-crosses and fake identities that I stopped caring who was who and which side they were on about halfway through the movie. By the time the end came, I forgot who I was supposed to be rooting for.

The acting performances were simply atrocious. Bruce Willis played Hudson Hawk exactly like his David Addision character from the television show Moonlighting. There was nothing about him that even hinted that he could be an amazing cat burglar, so I just didn't buy the premise of the movie. In addition, Grant and Bernhard were so over the top as the Mayflowers that it was annoying rather than funny.

Overall, Hudson Hawk was every bit the stinker that the critics made it out to be back in 1991. If you've managed to avoid it for this long, then there's absolutely no reason for you to attempt a viewing now. If you've already seen this movie and just happened to come across this review while surfing the Internet, allow me to apologize for stirring up bad memories!