Tony Scott spent over 20 years directing TV commercials before breaking into features in the early 80s, whereupon he became a favorite of uber-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. At first dismissed as a visually flashy hack—or, worse, “Ridley’s little brother,” which, while true, is still a slight—in the early 90s, in large part due to directing True Romance, more critics started grudgingly conceding some depth. Visually speaking, with his high-contrast lighting and six-cups-of-coffee editing style, eventually even critics who hated his pictures eventually had to concede his status as an auteur with a distinct signature.
His status or lack thereof as an auteur, however, is not what makes Tony Scott Tony Fucking Scott. The man simply makes entertaining movies, some of them the most entertaining of his era. A Tony Scott movie is not the sort of thing one discusses while sipping red wine and stroking your goatee and murmuring about “film.” Tony Scott movies are visceral experiences.
Here, for the uninitiated, is an overview of my man’s career. For the initiated, a chance to reminisce:
The Hunger (1983)
Tony’s debut feature is notable for three things—
a) his signature stylish camerawork,
b) an incongruously fucking amazing performance by David Bowie as an immortal coming to grips with his mortality and decay, deteriorating rapidly and dying rather melodramatically at the end of the first act,
c) Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon having kinky vampire sex
—but mostly only remembered for c). If it was a better movie, that would be unfortunate.
Initially, Tony wanted to adapt Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire (a hell of a “What If?” in cinema history) but the studio wanted him to direct their vampire movie, this one. One wonders if the narrative incoherence and now-legendary gratuitous lesbian scene were a result of Tony not really giving a shit: “This wasn’t the movie I really wanted to make,” or some such. Oh, well. We all have to start somewhere.
Top Gun (1986)
The first “Tony Fucking Scott” movie, and as such needs no introduction. Instead, a word from noted Tony Scott scholar Quentin Tarantino. (relevant part begins at 0:40)
And, because what is a blog if not a forum for self-indulgence, a variation on the above scene, from a play I directed in college, improvised in rehearsal by my good friend Steve Gilpin:
If you’re telling me Maverick didn’t want to fuck Goose, you are deluded. And Kelly McGillis is a well-known lesbian, so you know she was just a beard. And fuckin’, when Maverick is supposed to be out bangin’ McGillis, what’s he doing? Playing volleyball with the sweaty, half-naked Goose, Slider, and Iceman. I mean, bros before hoes is one thing, but that is some blatant homoeroticism!
Clearly, there’s some “there” there. The late Don Simpson, though apparently not gay himself, claimed to borrow elements from gay culture for the signature Simpson/Bruckheimer style, though aside from Top Gun, the only gay elements I can remember in any Simpson/Bruckheimer movies are a few blatant stereotypes, like in Beverly Hills Cop when Eddie pretends to be the villain’s lover as a way to insult him by proxy.
On the other hand, Top Gun brims with gay, which depending on one’s orientation is either cause to titter insecurely or sit back and enjoy. Just about every scene has muscular naked men in towels. Kelly McGillis reveals she wants to fuck Tom Cruise by dressing as a boy. And for years, I thought that when they were saying “RIO” (radar intercept officer), they were saying “rear,” which is an easy mistake to make when one considers that Goose, the RIO, is clearly the pilot, Maverick’s, bottom. Also, lest we forget, the aforementioned half-naked volleyball scene was scored to a song called “Playing With the Boys.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding, we are discussing a classic. In college, some friends of mine and I played a Top Gun drinking game wherein we drank every time Tom Cruise was cool, which was merely an excuse for us all to down a beer in one gulp during Tom Cruise’s first scene, and having established our point symbolically, let the remainder of the game go without saying (since we, as college students, did not have enough money for the amount of beer we’d need to drink every time Tom Cruise was cool). To paraphrase another successful movie from the mid 80s, gay, in a word, is good.
Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
Completely unnecessary, shits all over the original, aggressively stupid, serves no purpose whatsoever other than to make money, notable only for a slow pan up Brigitte Neilsen’s legs, followed by Eddie’s awed question: “Damn, baby, how long does it take you to shave those legs?” Even then, Eddie kills the joke by muttering to himself “Man, that’s a big bitch,” because we didn’t get that she was tall the first time around.
Fortunately, Tony goes on to bigger and better things.
Revenge (1990)
I heard it sucks. I love Tony, but there are only so many hours in a day.
Days of Thunder (1990)
It’s stupid and loud, and I couldn’t give less of a fuck about NASCAR if I were in a coma, but Robert Duvall’s really good, you get to see an early John C. Reilly being funny (see also Grace, State of, same year), Randy Quaid tells Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall they “[look] like a monkey fuckin' a football,” it has the requisite, completely reliable Fred Dalton Thompson performance (shitty senator, great character actor), and last but not least, features the 22 year old, still-redheaded Nicole Kidman in one of the great moments of my early adolescence as an almost-plausible Australian neurosurgeon. Almost, but not quite, kind of like the movie.
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Now we’re talkin’, motherfucker. Rewritten though it may have been, it still began life as a script by the great Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) and like all of Mr. Black’s work, is the blue note to the ear of 13 year old boys of all ages. Having been a 13 yr old boy at the time of this movie’s release, I’m both completely incapable of objectivity and a passionately sincere advocate of this movie’s brilliance.
The tone is established nicely in the very first scene, a football game in a torrential rainstorm (in Los Angeles, no less) in a stadium where the lights are apparently broken. The star running back for the LA team takes a phone call from a sinister gambler, pops some pills, and takes the field for the second half, during which he breaks away for a long touchdown run that will apparently make the score what it needs to be for the sinister gambler to win his bet, except there’s a tackler in his way, so the running back (played by Tae Bo time-capsule denizen Billy Blanks) employs the age-old “pull an automatic from his skin-tight football pants where it somehow remained hidden and proceed to shoot half the defense in the head” scoring strategy. Everyone runs over to him—of course, because who would run away under such circumstances?—and Billy takes his helmet off, and in one of the greatest Bad Acting Moments of all time, says “Ain’t life a bitch?” and blows his brains out.
With the bravura opening out of the way, Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans are introduced as, respectively, an extremely low-rent wisecracking private detective and the disgraced ex-quarterback whose stripper girlfriend the detective is hired to protect. The girlfriend is machine-gunned by the bad guys, and Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans set the male-bonding process in motion by busting each other’s balls. Bruce Willis, it transpires, was a Secret Service agent who once took a bullet for the president, and Damon Wayans is battling addiction to painkillers to cope with his football injuries. Bruce Willis has a daughter who curses more than him and Damon Wayans put together, who the gay bad guy kidnaps, in a moment of unprecedented and never-again paralleled feat of Bad Guy Strategy. There’s a bit of hand-wringing about the influence professional gamblers have on pro football. Many cars go fast. Many things explode. Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans become friends, and kill all the bad guys. Everyone lives happily ever after.
To call The Last Boy Scout stupid is simultaneously accurate, beside the point, completely redundant, and fuck you. It is what it is, it succeeds perfectly in being what it is, and is thus a success. Also, historically important for being one of the first times I saw the director’s name in the opening credits of a movie and knew I was in for a good time: “Oh, Tony Scott. That means it’s good.”
True Romance (1993)
A landmark of my youth, and my favorite movie for quite some time. I hadn’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet, but when this came out, I’d read enough about this Quentin Tarantino person that I was interested. And so I went to the sadly-defunct Metropolitan on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn, sat in the first row of what used to be the balcony before they cut it up into smaller theaters, and had what ended up being a screening for my mom and me only. She never quite got what I saw in it, but goddamn I loved it.
Amazingly, it still holds up to this day. Everything that made me laugh the first time still makes me laugh just as hard now. QT’s script is wonderful, which contributed greatly to Tony finally getting some love from the critics. The cast is terrific (Brad Pitt, holding up his bong to the Mafia hitman: “Hey, you wanna . . . smoke a bowl?” The mafia guy chambers a round into his shotgun with an impatient cha-chik.
Oh, True Romance. Oh, oh, oh. Verbose criticism fails me. Moving along.
Crimson Tide (1995)
An important chapter in my education about how movies were made: I had never given much thought to screenwriting credits before reading about this, how Robert Towne and the above mentioned Mr. Tarantino did uncredited rewrites (which aren’t that hard to spot: who else could have written the banter about submarine movies and the Silver Surfer other than Quentin? Is that Robert Towne I see lurking in the background of that bit where Gene Hackman discourses on the Lipazzaner stallion?)
It was also an instructive example for me on how to watch a movie. In spite of my already long-standing love for Tony Scott at the time this movie came out, I saw the name “Tony Scott” and “Jerry Bruckheimer” and thought “action movie.” So, the plot about the Russian separatists stealing nukes and threatening World War III struck me as having a fatal flaw the first time I saw this: I knew they weren’t going to launch the nukes, so I thought the conclusion was foregone and there was no point to the rest of the movie. It was only years later, catching it on cable in the middle of the night, that I realized the whole bit about the Russians and the nukes was window dressing (the fact that we only hear about them from television broadcasts and over the phone is a clue that they’re somewhere else, that where we are is where it’s at). This is a movie about Old School—Gene Hackman’s “if it’s war they want, then it’s war they shall have” bluster—versus New School—Denzel’s cautious, cerebral, more philosophic “war as an absolute last resort” viewpoint. Does the Old School Cold Warrior still have a place in a world without Soviets? Or do we still need him to kick some ass with the Russians still acting the fool? Is Denzel a pussy (blasphemy, I know . . . sorry, sir) or is the intellectual a necessary player in the military world? Now that I know what Crimson Tide’s really about, I watch it every time it comes on cable. And I learned to appreciate a movie for what it actually is, not what I want it to be.
The Fan (1996)
Didn’t see it, due to a chronic pain in the testicles that recurs whenever I see a movie where Robert De Niro does something that’s beneath him. Also, Wesley Snipes looks kind of ridiculous playing sports; if I want to see him look like a dork in a baseball uniform, I’ll watch Major League, which is supposed to be funny.
Enemy of the State (1998)
My favorite Will Smith movie. He bugs me sometimes, because he’s so effortlessly charismatic—those set-your-watch-by-them $100 million grosses aren’t an accident—that a lot of times he looks like he’s coasting to the point of boredom. Not here. He’s not exactly straining his acting muscles, but his wiseass one-liners actually work here, much in the way Philip Marlowe’s always did: as a way of hiding nervousness and vulnerability as opposed to merely being there to be there.
The story is good for letting one’s inner libertarian out for a good kvetch: the NSA is watching all of us at all times, and they’re drunk on the power that that unlimited knowledge affords them until ONE MAN . . . wait, actually two men, since Gene Hackman does all the work . . . until TWO MEN GIVE THEM A TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE. Sure, it’s a little reductive, and it assumes the typical villainous disregard for all else than personal power movies always give sinister government officials (or sinister businessmen if you’re further Left), but surveillance does need to be practiced with discretion, and the government are a bunch of fucking assholes . . .
Enemy of the State also has a nearly bottomless cast of people who were famous within 2-3 years, so even if the action flags—which it doesn’t, since this is Tony Fucking Scott—you can have fun being like, “holy shit, it’s that guy, holy shit, it’s that guy” every scene.
Spy Game (2001)
Another bit of a change for Tony, this time an action movie where the action is all diplomatic wrangling by Robert Redford to save Brad Pitt’s ass, and the story is all in flashback. Not bad, but still, when the closing credits roll you nod, say “that was interesting, but I never need to see it again” and pop The Last Boy Scout on for a good hoot and holler.
The Hire: Beat the Devil (2002)
Those fuckin' BMW films really pissed me off because they were—for the most part—really good, by directors I—for the most part—like, but they were really just car commercials when you got right down to it, no matter how cool Clive Owen is (and to calculate how cool Clive Owen is, a team of mathematicians have been working around the clock for five years to figure out how to count that high).
Tony’s actually kinda sucked, sadly. I remember the camera jerking around all over the place and James Brown doing something, but not much else. Joe Carnahan, of all people, made the best one, even if he ripped his own plot device off for the retarded ending of Smokin’ Aces (one of the larger and stinkier turds of the past couple decades).
Man on Fire (2004)
A reminder that one of the dumbest things you can do is to get Denzel pissed off at you. Only Ethan Hawke ever made it out of that predicament, and that was because Denzel, force of nature that he is, hubristically brought about his own undoing.
Although it’s way too long, and even for Tony Fuckin Scott the visual pyrotechnics are a bit excessive, watching Denzel and Dakota Fanning together is genuinely affecting. And seeing the clouds part and the Wrath of Denzel rain down upon the infidels is always fun.
Domino (2005)
Surgeon general’s warning: watching when sober can be damaging to one’s mental health. Use discretionary amounts of controlled substances for optimal viewing experience. Further warning: avoid at all costs if Keira Knightley isn’t your cup of tea, looks- or talent-wise.
Bizarrely, based on a true story (Laurence Harvey’s daughter really was a bounty hunter named Domino), but the fact that the real Domino died before the movie’s release kind of makes it hard to watch a hallucinatory, escapist tall tale based on her life where she narrowly escapes death at the end. Also, Tony is kind of pushing his luck as Tony Fucking Scott by this point; his camera moves have gotten as gratuitous as the lesbian scene in The Hunger.
Déjà Vu (2006)
This is actually a really good movie. Welcome back, Tony! Denzel plays an ATF agent who investigates a terrorist attack on a New Orleans riverboat only to find—awesomely—that he can travel back in time to prevent it from ever happening. Let’s review:
Denzel + Tony Fucking Scott + SF + New Orleans locations = yes.
The fact that it was shot in post-Katrina New Orleans doesn’t have much to do with the movie (one gets the sense the script was set in pre-Katrina New Orleans), but it adds a subtle edge to the riverboat blowing up: “Fuck, not again.” This gives a very compelling and urgent despair to Denzel’s drive to get to the bottom of things. Of course, being a movie, he falls in love with one of the victims, so now he’s not only averting the terrorist attack, he’s also saving the woman he loves.
Tony’s first foray into SF manages to be more plausible than The Last Boy Scout (admittedly, he didn’t exactly sprain anything accomplishing that), largely because he underplays the SF technology and gadgetry and focuses on the human stories. Denzel is Denzel, and let no man take his name in vain. Also, after seeing him play Jesus Christ, it was fun seeing Jim Caviezel play a right-wing lunatic. And Val Kilmer, waddling around in one of those “hey, look at me, I’m managing to have fun and pay the rent at the same time” performances is a point of interest as well.
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
Didn’t really piss me off that much when I saw it, because Tony Fucking Scott can prevail over just about any script, no matter how shitty, but then I remembered that I’m a New Yorker and that the original should be left alone. Denzel still manages to be terrific, here because he somehow manages to come across as a regular guy . . . but still not as good as he was in Inside Man, which is a couple orders of magnitude better movie than this money grab.
You made it to the end! Congratulations. Coming up from our old pal is an interesting-looking train movie called Unstoppable, with Denzel returning once more in the lead, and, sadly, a remake of The Warriors . . . set in LA. Goddammit, Tony. Don’t make me regret taking you seriously. Still, if all else fails, we still have The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, and many long hours questioning our sexuality to Top Gun.
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