“They get pissed off”: the 2002 movie Cole Hauser admitted lied to the audience
Fans of the Fast & Furious franchise might remember Cole Hauser from the first sequel in the seemingly eternal saga. In the wonderfully titled 2 Fast 2 Furious, he plays Carter Verone, a drug baron who is the target of series protagonist Brian O’Conner, famously played by the late Paul Walker.
A year prior to his debut in the Fastverse (or whatever it’s called), Hauser appeared in a very different film called Hart’s War. Starring Colin Farrell (after Edward Norton dropped out) as the titular soldier taken prisoner during World War II. The film also features Bruce Willis, Terrence Howard, and a young Sam Worthington. Hauser plays Vic Bedford, a racist soldier also interred at the camp.
During an interview with Film Freak Central, Hauser was asked about Hart’s War in relation to another film he’d made on a similar subject. Tigerland had been released two years before Hart’s War and was also set in a military camp, albeit during the Vietnam War. Weirdly, it also starred Colin Farrell.
The interview asked Hauser why he thought Tigerland, which had a considerably smaller budget than Hart’s War, had turned out so much better. According to the Yellowstone actor, it was a matter of marketing.
“When you mis-promote a film, as opposed to not promoting a film like with Tigerland, you do your work an incredible disservice,” he explained. “In the two trailers for Hart’s War, they showed the only two action sequences in the film – the piece was a race drama and a courtroom drama. You’ve got to be really careful not to try to trick the audience – they get pissed off and they’re not as stupid as some people in Hollywood maybe think that they are.”
The trailer for Hart’s War, which you can watch for yourself at the end of this article, frames the film as more of a prison escape movie. In reality, the plot mostly revolves around a court-martial trial of an African-American prisoner. Farrell’s character, Thomas Hart, was a law student before the role, and is called on to defend his fellow captive. While there are action sequences in the film, notably towards the end of the runtime, most of the action is confined to the courtroom.
The end result of this deception was a film that was average in every possible sense. Reviewers found it hard to truly fault the movie, but most weren’t exactly overwhelmed. The gussied-up trailer made little impact on ticket sales either. From a budget of $70million thoguh, it made just $33.1m back.
Tigerland, on the other hand, which is set in a training facility in the final years of the Vietnam War, was a critical smash. It made barely any money at the box office – less than $150,000 from a $10m budget – but reviews were glowing. It’s one of the best films Joel Schumacher ever directed and helped launch Farrell’s career.
Hauser and the rest of the cast worked incredibly hard on Hart’s War, but were ultimately undone by decisions made elsewhere. This episode just goes to show that there is much more to the success of a movie than what’s on the screen.
