Nate & Hayes (1983)
DIRECTOR: Ferdinand Fairfax
CAST: Tommy Lee Jones, Michael O’Keefe, Jenny Seagrove, Max Phipps
REVIEW:
Before the immensely lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, pirate movies were considered non-starters at the box office. 1983’s Nate & Hayes was a rare attempt at shoving one out into theaters, but sank like a stone to general critical scorn and a lackluster financial performance. While the fairly obscure film has a small but loyal cult following that regards it as an underrated swashbuckler from the days long before Captain Jack Sparrow, it’s actually exactly what the critics at the time regarded it as….a sloppy, slapdash rather feeble effort that tries and fails to muster up some good old-fashioned swashbuckling derring-do.
After a prologue of pirate “Bully” Hayes (Tommy Lee Jones) awaiting his hanging in a Spanish prison, we flashback to how he got there. Some time earlier, Hayes delivered a young couple, uptight snobbish missionary Nathaniel (Michael O’Keefe) and his bride-to-be Sophie (Jenny Seagrove), for whom Hayes also has an eye, to their island mission. Alas, shortly thereafter the wedding is rudely interrupted by a band of marauders led by Hayes’ nemesis Ben Pease (Max Phipps), who murders Nathaniel’s family, takes the natives to sell as slaves, and absconds with Sophie for….some reason, I guess. This leads to our less-than-dynamic duo of Nate and Hayes (roll credits!) grudgingly teaming up to track down and eliminate Pease and rescue Sophie. A rather feeble facsimile of swashbuckling adventure ensues.
That we’re on shaky ground is evident from the get-go, when Tommy Lee Jones has a run-in with some stereotypical hostile natives (there’ll be plenty more of those, in even more ugly stereotypical forms, later) and makes a narrow escape in pseudo-Indiana Jones fashion (actually the movie spends quite a bit of time being derivative of Indiana Jones in between the pirate hijinks), and things don’t improve from there. The movie’s limited budget is way too obvious—it was financed entirely with New Zealand money—and has a cheap TV look and feel which the flat direction by Ferdinand Fairfax (heard of him? Me neither.) is unable to do anything to enliven. The script (co-written by a young John Hughes, oddly enough) cheerfully throws lots of cliches at the wall to see what sticks. A dashing swashbuckling hero (or at least that’s what Hayes is meant to be)? Check. A snooty foil? Check. A damsel in distress? Check. A mismatched odd couple teaming up in buddy movie/odd couple/action-comedy fashion? Check. And if dastardly pirates (evil pirates, not the lovable scalawags Hayes and his crew are meant to be) and painfully stereotypical cannibal natives aren’t enough in the “villain” contingent, let’s randomly throw in some Germans because movies love villainous Germans, even in situations where their presence doesn’t make any sense (led by the not at all German Grant Tilly, who’s obviously a local Kiwi thrown into a German uniform and looks, talks, and acts like Discount Richard Attenborough). Maybe this might have been enjoyably ridiculous if any flair or energy had been brought to the proceedings, but the direction and cinematography is flat, and the action is clumsily-handled and sometimes unconvincing (Nate dubiously manages to win a hand-to-hand fight with a machete-wielding henchman who can’t hit anything), while Trevor Jones’ overblown “rousing” musical score desperately tries to convince us anything exciting is happening. Stuff happens just because. Nate somehow manages to end up stranded standing on a rock in the middle of the ocean. The “climax” (such as it is) involves first our heroes making an escape from some stereotypical cannibalistic native sacrificial temple of doom that looks like a set from Masters of the Universe (I guess we know where most of the budget went) and then skipping their merry way over into a showdown between a pirate ship and a steam-powered Imperial German warship. Then just to make things more anti-climactic, we finally get back to where we were at the beginning, with a rescue and more narrow escapes, and a love triangle that fizzles with no real resolution.
Tommy Lee Jones looks the part of a roguish adventurer, until he opens his mouth and suddenly seems less comfortable in the role. He tosses out some cheeky one-liners, but without much panache. Michael O’Keefe is adequate as long as he’s being stiff and uptight, until he’s supposed to actually display emotion and loosen up with Hayes and his crew, and reveals he’s just wooden. As the ostensibly fetching Sophie, Jenny Seagrove is his partner-in-blandness. As the generic villain, Max Phipps sneers and glares and twirls his mustache but fails to make any kind of impression. There’s a “bottom of the barrel” feel to all the actors here except Tommy Lee Jones, and he doesn’t seem at home in the part of the ostensibly dashing adventurer.
At the bottom line, Nate & Hayes at least managed to amass a small but loyal fanbase that views it as an underappreciated overlooked gem, but the movie is actually exactly what it’s regarded as, a cheaply slapped together mess that doesn’t know what it’s trying to be and when it’s not aping better swashbucklers, tries to ape Indiana Jones. You have to have an insatiable appetite for all things pirate movies to be very interested by this rather lame offering.
* 1/2