Hudson Hawk
This is an incredible mix of musical, stereotypical James Bond flick, and noir adventure, in that order. Mamma mia!
Hudson Hawk is the name, or Eddie for his friends. He just got out of jail, but he’s still the best cat burglar ever. Most importantly, he still knows the runtimes of many Jazz classics to the second, which he uses for timing his heists.
He wants to lay low, but some mobsters want a horse from a safe, so there he goes back into a life of crime. They won’t take no for an answer. It’s not what it seems.
There are so many villains: the Mayflower siblings, the CIA, some Guido mobsters. They are get they comeuppance in the end, but our hero gets knocked out a lot anyway. No matter how goofy, bookdumb, and from New Jersey he is, the villains will be vanquished.
There’s also a love interest, an undercover nun trying to keep the Da Vinci codes safe in the Vatican’s hands. This includes the gold-generating they keep under wraps. No wonder they have a bank…
At first, the Vatican organisation is in cahoots with the spooks, but the CIA has an arrangement with the management, the Mayflower power. The nun reneges on her pal and goes back to the cardinal. A death is faked, the Mayflower do not flake, but the spooks take.
Our hero just wants a cappuccino, but the world conspires against that wish. Every time he has one in his hand, something happens and he loses it, or it gets shot, or it’s poison. He really needs the whole film to finally drink his cappuccino.
The supporting cast here is out of this world. Props for every single villain with a speaking role. Even Butterfinger. Major props for David Caruso as Kit Kat, even though it’s technically a non-speaking role.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.