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Sit tight. I’ll tell you.

First, Richard Donner handles Ladyhawke with brutish, clumsy hands, like a kid trying to put together a Lego set with mittens on. The inherent sweetness that made The Toy and The Goonies so much fun is not here, and the surprising nobility and poignancy he found in the story of Superman is likewise absent. Donner is closer to Lethal Weapon form here, turning Ladyhawke into a flat footed buddy film; a three camera sitcom shot outdoors without a laugh track, but with plenty of tin foil swords and actors who don’t know how to use them. The tone is entirely inappropriate, but the fault is not all Donner’s. This is what happens when you have too many cooks stirring the pot - it took four people to write a screenplay that wouldn’t have been good enough to get me a C in ninth grade English.

Donner fails, the school bus full of screenwriters fail, but everyone else tries - Michelle Pfeiffer is elegant as always, but she has little to do here but stand around looking pretty while two boring, egotistical meatheads fight over her like she’s not even there. Broderick has since made a career out of playing neurotic halfwits, and he does so quite well here. He even rocks more or less the same haircut he would wear as Ferris Bueller a year later. He’s really the best thing about the movie, save the stupid accent. I know it sounds trivial, but the fault isn’t mine. This is a trivial movie. I’m not sure what order they filmed the scenes in, but I get the impression they tried half the movie with an accent, which Broderick was not good at, and just decided to drop the whole matter for the second half of the film.

Thanks (or not) to the magic of the edit room, we end up with a finished product where from scene to scene, Broderick either sounds like a smart ass kid from New York, or a smart ass kid from York - with a significant speech impediment. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you hear it, and the failure to address such simple things is indicative of all that’s wrong with Ladyhawke. It feels like a cynical cash grab, a lazy attempt to take advantage of the craze du jour that was sweeping Hollywood at the time. You know, kind of like the endless glut of dull, shapeless hero flicks coming out of Tinseltown today.

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