YMMV / Cutthroat Island

• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack is probably John Debney's best as well as one of the top modern swashbuckling film scores - or just top film scores, period. A number of veteran film score collectors consider it even superior to the music from Pirates of the Caribbean. To note how those notions translated to objective success, Debney was just about the only participant in the film whose career actually benefitted from working on it - he remains a prolific, in-demand composer to this day.
• Complete Monster: Douglas "Dawg" Brown is the Black Sheep of the Adams pirate brothers and the captain of the ship Reaper. Each of his three brothers has a piece of a map to a fabulous treasure and Dawg wants it all to himself. The first thing we learn about him is he murdered one brother and has another hostage to murder after he gets his piece of the map. When his brother gives his map to his daughter Morgan, Dawg stops at nothing to kill his niece. He attacks his last brother Mordecai and threatens to run him through if Mordecai doesn't give up the map. When a luckless mook accidentally falls into Mordecai and impales him on Dawg's knife, Dawg kills the man growling that he killed Dawg's brother, though he's only angry Mordecai died before Dawg got the map. He tries to torture Morgan by trying to let an eel eat her face, guns down a crewman when the man complains they're running out of food and stops at no crime short of trying to steal the treasure from Cutthroat Island.
• Critical Backlash: Cutthroat Island was one of the biggest box office bombs ever, as well as the film credited with sinking the entire pirate flick genre, so it is just natural that many viewers consider it (at least) not as bad as such a dishonor might suggest. In fact, there are quite a few who have come to believe it is actually a genuinely good movie regardless of all the economic mismanagement and production troubles that led to its failure. Roger Ebert was among those; at the very time of the film's release, while most professional critics were panning it, he gave it three out of four stars, the same number he would give years later to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The tough, tattooed, fair-minded Mr. Blair from Morgan's crew and Chain Pain-deploying Snelgrave (one of the Co-Dragons) are seventh and eighth in the credits, but are better liked than most of the other characters.
• Ham and Cheese: Frank Langella is clearly having the time of his life as Dawg.
• Misblamed:
  • It's been argued that Cutthroat Island didn't actually kill pirate films per se, as the genre was basically dead to begin with at the time of its production: very few pirate movies had been produced in many years due to the cost of building sets (particularly life-size boats), and none of them had been especially relevant (the only one that could come to mind is Roman Polański's Pirates, which already tanked badly in the decade prior to this one). The claim could be more correctly rephrased as that the film buried pirate films deeper, as its spectacular failure ended up causing the incidental impression that the genre had really stopped being popular and wasn't simply worthy to try to refloat it. Furthermore, given that Pirates of the Caribbean is the only franchise that represents it decades later, it could even be entertained that this impression was actually right.
  • Carolco Pictures was popularly believed to have gone bankrupt with the sinking of Cutthroat Island, but Renny Harlin has denied this, pointing to the fact that it filled for bankruptcy a whole month before its release. According to him, the studio was already in ruins when the film began production, and they only bothered to do the film anyways because all the foreign investors' money had been already spent.
  • Some modern reviewers speculated one of the reasons of the film's little box office interest was because it was starred by an Action Girl in midst of The '90s. However, while Geena Davis's previous career might have certainly undermined the perception of her as an action heroine (up to that point, outside Thelma & Louise, Davis had mostly worked in comedic films, and it tells that she never really left that niche again afterwards), action girls at leading roles was hardly a new thing in 90s Hollywood, as the cultural importance of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor can attest. If anything, a more likely reason might have been that Davis precisely failed at living up to those figures, and as a result, it only felt like a lame attempt to capitalize on them to relaunch her career.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Naturally, the film received a bad tie in video game, made by Acclaim in their heyday of creating such licensed swill. While it does have some admittedly nice sprite animation (particularly for the handheld versions), overall the games are a boring slog of fighting waves after waves of enemies, broken up with mine cart levels that require pixel perfect memorization lest one wrong move sends you back to the start of the level. And then it has the gall to "reward" you with nothing but a A Winner Is You congratulations screen.
• So Okay, It's Average: Watching the film without any of its historical background in mind can easily give the impression that it is just a small step away from being a legitimately great movie. Everything — the action, the humour, the dialogue, the romance, the characters — is generally okay, sometimes even good, but it carries something that makes it seem just a bit... off. It might be the on-set climate of its Troubled Production leaking in, the inexperience of some cast members, or simply that, as said above, the genre Cutthroat Island buried was really dying by itself and it didn't translate well to the cinema style of The '90s. The only thing that totally works is John Debney's score, which is phenomenal - in fact, some people have said it's actually too good, as in so epic that the movie can't live up to it and draws attention to how mediocre everything else is.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Some fans think Morgan's cowardly but respected uncle Mordechai could/should have survived long enough to join the party, bond more with Morgan, and get some Sibling Yin-Yang contrasts with Dawg.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: General consensus on the movie is that there's a good story in there somewhere, behind all the messy rewrites, awful dialogue, and giant explodey setpieces. The characters of Morgan Adams and William Shaw could have been delightful if handled by a more talented crew, and the idea of a movie about a female pirate could have been amazing and genre-changing had it been done more competently (and with more luck). Sadly, the movie's massive financial failure yet talented cast stand mostly as a monument to things that could have been better.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Both the My Year Of Flops review and The Nostalgia Chick review credit Frank Langella for trying his best to save the movie despite a conspicuous lack of effort from everyone else (including the very leads, who reportedly got tired of the film due to its hellish production). Of course, to hear Langella tell it, he wasn't trying to save the movie... he was just having a fantastic time playing pirates.
• Vindicated by History: To a degree. While definitely not a major Cult Classic, the movie has its fans today, and a lot of people looking for other swashbuckler films about pirates than Pirates of the Caribbean has come to defend it as a better product than its chaotic production and reputation might lead to believe.

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