THE PHANTOM
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Paramount) Starring: Billy Zane, Treat Williams, Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta Jones, James Remar. Screenplay: Jeffrey Boam. Producers: Robert Evans, Alan Ladd Jr. Director: Simon Wincer. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The recipe for THE PHANTOM is the result of the kind of perverse logic which produces some of Hollywood's most spectacular flops. There is a super-hero in a form-fitting costume, because the people seemed to love it in SUPERMAN and BATMAN; there is derring-do in the 1930s involving mysterious and powerful relics, because the people seemed to love it in the Indiana Jones films; there is a nasty industrialist and a feisty heroine because, well, the people always seem to love that. In short, THE PHANTOM is an action-adventure Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from pieces of other much better films -- and then nobody remembered to give it a jolt of energy.
Based on the 60-year-old comic strip by Lee Falk, THE PHANTOM tells of Kit Walker (Billy Zane), the latest in a line of legendary figures carrying on a 400-year old oath handed down from father to son to fight "piracy, cruelty and injustice in all its forms" as The Phantom. The form it takes in 1938 is Xander Drax (Treat Williams), a power-hungry millionaire who has learned of the existence of three ancient skulls which, when brought together, can generate an incredible power. Drax's plans have become known to a New York newspaper publisher (Bill Smitrovich), who sends his niece Diana (Kristy Swanson) to investigate a mysterious web symbol which appears to be connected to the plan. When Diana is kidnapped by Drax's operatives, The Phantom comes to the rescue, and Diana joins him on a mission to keep the skulls out of Drax's hands.
If THE PHANTOM resembles any other recent attempt at cinematic super-heroism, it is 1994's bomb THE SHADOW. It is a film which never once carves out for itself a distinct theme -- too straight most of the time to be camp, and too dumb to work as a rousing adventure. Director Simon Wincer (LONESOME DOVE, FREE WILLY) has many talents, but he is a bad choice for an action adventure. Wincer likes to let his stories unfold at a leisurely pace, but there isn't much of a story to unfold in THE PHANTOM. That leaves him with action set pieces which are slow, perfunctory, and lacking a unique flavor. THE PHANTOM feels like the work of a director who simply never had an idea about what to do with the material.
To be fair to Wincer, that appears to be true of the cast as well. Billy Zane, a solid physical presence who looks frighteningly like Peter Gallagher's younger brother, provides no personality for either The Phantom or Kit Walker. The best adjective for Zane's Phantom is affable -- he goes about the business of dispatching bad guys as though he were a neighborhood beat cop in a 1930s movie, waving his baton at a couple of young ruffians and admonishing them to run along home, now. Similarly, megalomania has never seemed as charming and unthreatening as it does coming from Treat Williams, in one of the least interesting villain performances in recent memory. When Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa turns up as pirate lord Kabai Sengh nearly 90 minutes into THE PHANTOM, I found myself utterly stumped as to why he wasn't the primary bad guy, since at least he had charisma. And pity poor Kristy Swanson, trying so hard to be a spunky liberated woman that she never bothers to notice that she doesn't have a character to play.
Rarely have I seen a so-called adventure film in which so many participants seemed to be going through the motions like basketball players on the wrong side of a blow-out, wrestling with a thoroughly synthetic script. Jeffrey Boam (INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, LETHAL WEAPON 2 & 3) knows how to work with established characters in an established formula, and that's the way he approaches THE PHANTOM: as though we already know the drill, he's just filling in the blanks, and The Phantom character's status as antecedent to modern action films shields it from charges of wholesale theft. But it simply isn't the case that his audience is essentially familiar with The Phantom. He assumes that we know Kit Walker and Diana Palmer, and that he doesn't need to bother setting up their relationship; he assumes that we are already on the side of his hero. He assumes that if he takes a story which could have been the next Indiana Jones adventure (which, incidentally, is Boam's next project) and puts a guy in a purple suit in place of the guy with the fedora, no one will notice. Lee Falk's Phantom may be 60 years old, but to movie audiences, he's just another guy in a cover band trying to pass himself off as a rock star.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 purple wanes: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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