Review of Ladyhawke (1985) by Matthew S — 21 Jul 2011

In Ladyhawke, Richard Donner brings us a fairytale in which a man and a woman are cursed by a bishop to be always together and yet always apart. You see, the man is a man during the day and a wolf by night, while the woman is a woman by night and a hawk by day. And now I apologize for spoiling the first hour of the film, but you should be able to figure out what's going on in the first 15 minutes. And since it is so obvious the viewer what is going on, one wonders why they needed to drag everything out so long. All necessary story elements could have fit nicely into one hour. It's a pretty good story; it just doesn't need to be drawn out so much.

Maybe it feels so drawn out because the front half didn't tell the back half what it was doing, something which is at least true with the score. Every action scene in the first half of the film was accompanied by music that sounded like it was originally intended for a sports movie. Synths do not make sense for a medieval fantasy. Ever. Someone figured that out near the end and replaced the keyboards with strings.

Otherwise, everything seemed alright. Matthew Broderick was appropriately goofy and Rutger Hauer was appropriately brooding. The sets and costumes (minus the stupid hockey helmets the knights had) worked. It holds up much better than most 80s fantasy films, although there's nothing much to make it stand out.