Ladyhawke

What a fabulous looking movie. What a smashing start. What a junky picture. Really let me down after the opening. Look, I'm the biggest fan of sword and sorcery mythmaking in the world. But if you are going to try to make myths, you have to be true to your intentions. (Then maybe you can achieve something on the order of “Excalibur”). What this picture does instead is to constantly undercut everything it does, with silly/sarcastic lines, with plain stupid plot lapses, with an absurd score (which mixes Gregorian chants with 80's style synthesizer), and with Rutger Hauer. Rutger looks the part all right, but when he speaks he sounds like a Westchester WASP businessman. It cuts so far against the grain that I can never really believe him in the role, and that tears it. Is that a lapse of direction, or is he just a crappy actor? I'll never know. But the film is stunning to see, and a few sequences have great power, but it could have been so much more.