The 1993 movie so bad it literally made Angelina Jolie sick: “I saw it and I threw up”
Movies are more than capable of making audiences throw up, but it’s usually got more to do with blood, guts, gore, and violence than the fact that the film is crap. Angelina Jolie suffered that very fate in the early 1990s, though, and she had every reason to.
Not many actors enjoy watching themselves onscreen, with Samuel L Jackson being one of the few exceptions, but it must hurt a lot more for a performer who can barely bring themselves to watch their performance in the first place to see it unfold in a dogshit flick.
In a case of being very careful what you wished for, Jolie went the extra mile to ensure there was nothing off-limits in her proper feature-length debut in 1993’s Cyborg 2, her first foray into the family business since she made an uncredited appearance as a nipper in her old man Jon Voight’s comedy Lookin’ to Get Out over a decade previously.
These days, the Academy Award winner doesn’t even consider the sci-fi actioner her big-screen bow, which is fair enough, because it’s awful. Instead, she points to Hackers, which was released two years later, as the genuine arrival of a second-generation star who’d be one of the most famous rising talents in Hollywood by the end of the ’90s.
Jolie was only 17 when she was cast as Cash Reese, a prototype cybernetic assassin who realises that the people who created her plan to use her to blow up their rivals. Not entirely on board with the idea, she turns on her makers and flees with Elias Koteas’ Colt Ricks, because why have one main character with one-syllable ‘CR’ initials when you can have two?
Due to her age, labour laws limited the number of hours that she could legally work on any given day, so co-writer and director Michael Schroeder decided to see if she’d be interested in becoming emancipated. Fortunately for him, she was, and with Voight’s blessing, the recent high school graduate was officially declared a legal adult away from parental oversight.
The teenager also agreed to shoot a topless scene for the film, which is another conversation entirely, but after going to all that effort, her initial reaction to Cyborg 2 was far from enthusiastic. “Oh, I threw up,” Jolie recalled. “I did. I saw it and threw up. Just nausea. But the kickboxing was fun. I was sent to do kickboxing.”
Those skills would come in much handier when she was an A-lister and an action hero, but as she admitted, “I was 17, and I think I thought I was making a real movie,” which it most definitely was not, at least not as far as motion pictures with any merit go. “I saw it and got really sick” became her defining memory, which is understandable, because the film really is that bad.
The downside is that, as much as she’s keen to pretend otherwise, history will always remember Cyborg 2 as the first feature of Angelina Jolie’s career, but at least she didn’t spew after seeing Hackers, as far as we know.
