The awful movie Burt Reynolds admitted was a ripoff of a mediocre one: “Very much a copy”
Creativity has been running in short supply in Hollywood for decades, at least regarding the industry’s most expensive blockbusters. Burt Reynolds was nowhere near that playing field in the mid-1990s, but he still decided to come clean and admit one of his many terrible movies was a blatant ripoff.
If there’s one thing the actor could never be faulted for, it was his honesty, even if it wasn’t always in his best interests. Reynolds spent half a decade as the biggest star in the industry, but his fears over venturing too far outside of his wheelhouse came back to haunt him when he never came close to recovering that position from the early 1980s onwards.
He cracked the A-list for headlining a very specific type of film; ones in which he’d play a charismatic rogue who, more often than not, was a dab hand behind the wheel. Once those days were over, Reynolds lurched from paycheque gig to paycheque gig, and reached his nadir when he was reduced to the straight-to-video action circuit, a place Nicolas Cage discovered is hard to escape from.
On the plus side, he wasn’t too far away from turning a corner, with his Academy Award-nominated performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights releasing less than ten months after 1996’s Raven, a shoddy shoot ’em up where he plays an elite soldier double-crossed and left for dead by the man he thought was his best friend.
Reynolds didn’t care for screenwriter Jacobson Hart’s script, so he decided to perform sweeping rewrites, which sounded as though they were based entirely on a recent viewing experience. “I’ve changed every word of mine in the film,” he proclaimed to The New York Times.
“The really talented ones understand it’s a collaborative effort, and if you say something funny, they say, ‘I wrote that,'” he explained. “This movie is very much a copy of that [John] Travolta movie, Broken Arrow. I play the Travolta part. It’s a part I can play. It’s my part, my persona. And if you play a pink flamingo, you can play one for life, if it’s a hit.”
John Woo’s second Hollywood feature hit cinemas ten months before Raven, and it must have set the lightbulb off in Reynolds’ head. The plots are suspiciously similar, or at least, they would be if he hadn’t admitted he’d rewritten the script to try and copy it. It wasn’t even a good movie either, with the Hong Kong maestro delivering a by-the-numbers action flick that only shows flashes of his brilliance.
Still, it was more than enough for Reynolds to grab the pen and start rehashing Raven to bring it more in line with Broken Arrow, even if it begs the question as to why he’d choose such a resoundingly mediocre picture to try and make a bad one better.
