Ladyhawke (1985)
80's fantasy movie directed by Richard Donner of Superman fame.
Ladyhawke is the story of the cursed romance between disgraced knight Navarre, played by Blade Runner 's Rutger Hauer and his lover Isabeau, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. The evil bishop of Aquila made a pact with the devil that turns Navarre into a wolf by night and Isabeau into a hawk by day. Escaped thief Mouse (Matthew Broderick) ends up joining them in their quest to break the curse and get revenge.
There is something very interesting to fantasy movies before the gold standard of the Lord of the Rings trilogy had been established and Dungeons and Dragons became something average people are aware of. Without the iconography of epic fantasy fully realized, they were this weird, kind of experimental, genre that took from pulp novels, fairy tails, arthurian myth and European folk tales to different degrees with vastly different results.
Ladyhawke is certainly at the most airport paperback novel end of the spectrum, a pulpy cross between supernatural romance and swashbuckling adventure that neither leans into the melodrama, nor the adventure of it quite enough to fully capture the appeal of either. Between Matthew Broderick 's character who is established as the main protagonist, yet ends up serving as little more than an audience insert and Rutger Hauer being cast as a tragic romantic hero In a way that simply doesn't play to his strengths as an actor, I found Ladyhawke to be a rather dull and unremarkable movie.
There's some fun stuff in there, mostly in the performances of the supporting cast. Leo McKern as a drunk old priest and John Wood as a sneering evil bishop were enjoyable to watch and the movie has a jarring but strangely catchy funky synthesizer score, courtesy of Alan Parson, that really elevates some of its sequences, especially in the first act. Some nice visuals too, this gets a lot of mileage out of otherwordly pink skies and green fields. Not fully naturalistic but also not leaning fully into studio artifice.
Overall, though, this just didn't really do it for me. This just never gets corny and sentimental enough to work as a tragic romantic melodrama (and Rutger Hauer really wouldn't have been the right lead for that...) and it never gets exciting and adventurous enough to work as an action adventure. Much like it's two romantic leads, it exists in a transitional twilight where the two almost but not quite meet. There is also the fact that it very much feels like a movie relying on the strength of its premise, the sort of archetypal appeal of its whole cursed lovers setup, to the point it never feelt the need to write a satisfying narrative outline around it. The whole climax and resolution just fell really flat to me. Somehow Princess Bride, a parody of this sort of movie, hit the actual dramatic beats more effectively than this straight faced approach.
It's a valid attempt at a fantastical romance adventure movie but it just doesn't quite get there. It's kind of interesting to think that one year later, Highlander came out which I feel goes for a broadly similar flavour of fantasy cheese but executes it much more effectively and compellingly. Ladyhawke is probably one of the less remembered products of this era of fantasy, compared to trailblazers like Conan or Excalibur or indeed Highlander and I can't in good conscience say it deserves better. It's not iconic or well executed enough to warrant being considered a genre classic. There's likeable stuff in there but for me it never added up to anything genuinely remarkable.
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