Cutthroat Island follows Morgan Adams, a female pirate as she attempts to assemble a treasure map to a lost family treasure with her greedy and maniacal uncle on her tail. Her crew is skeptical of her leadership abilities, so she must complete her quest before they mutiny against her.
In this $90m revisionist swashbuckler, we get Geena Davis doing the all-action honours, and a hotchpotch script that seems to think pirate movies are so funny in themselves the need for more humour is superfluous.
Island is a one-of-a-kind, full-steam-ahead practical pirate event, and while it's bolted together with minimal attention to thespian proficiency, it sustains a special rhythm of eye candy and fortitude that makes it an enduring curiosity.
It's hardly the landlubber suggested by its reputation (which has more likely shifted more toward novel curiosity than cautionary tale). But if all the parties involved suspected they were going broke, they should have gone *for* broke to boot.
If the sight of half-naked, tattooed sailors firing cannons at each other shivers your timbers, climb aboard. Even passable pirate movies don't sail by every day.
Washington Post
January 01, 2000
It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie.
What seemed like a dubious proposition on paper plays even more dubiously onscreen, as "Cutthroat Island" strenuously but vainly attempts to revive the thrills of old-fashioned pirate pictures.