Harley-Davidson & the Marlboro Man

Okay. So I'm sitting around wishing I was riding when I spy Harley-Davidson & the Marlboro Man on Comcast On-Demand. Great, I'll have to check out this movie especially since I'm a kewl Harley riding dude these days and I smoke Marlboros.

As I'm getting comfy in front of Michelle's wide-screen multi-speaker entertainment apparatus, I'm thinking... it doesn't get much better than this.

WRONG!

Mickey Rourke plays Harley Davidson. Don Johnson plays the Marlboro Man. Neither performance is great but at least Mickey is believeable. In comparison to the rest of the cast, these two at least got their lines right and hit the director's marks.

The movie itself was made in 1991, back in the pre-dot.com era, when Hollywood was somewhat careful about throwing money away. I suspect that the producers were only able to finance this waste of celluloid by lining up some fat promotional buy-ins. Consider... the main characters are Harley-Davidson and the Marlboro man (Don Johnson's bike needed to be equipped with an oxygen tank and iron lung). I'd say those are two pretty recognizable brand names.

But wait... there's also a female character who goes by the name Virginia Slim. Geez... gimme a break. And just when you think the movie can't get any cheesy-er... another character gets introduced. Yup... Jack Daniels!!! So you can kind of see where the money got spent... and it wasn't on character development.

What???? No casting call for Johnnie Walker??? How 'bout the Hamburgler??? How did the producer/director let these two slide by?

Anyway... I wasted about 45 minutes watching this embarassing piece of film history before I called it quits. According to the wikipedia entry for this movie, it only garnered $7 million at the box office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=2037842

That's a disasterous return. Heck, I bet the catering budget was at least that much.

Save yourself the bother. I'd rather ride in the rain downhill over oily gravel than watch this movie again.

Laurence