Not Cool, Man

Over the years, I've seen Cool Hand Luke show up on several critics' top movie lists. John Cusack reportedly slipped into one of his own movies a reference to how much he liked it. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an impossibly high 100% critic rating.

Well, they sure didn't talk to me.

I sat down recently with two friends who I learned had also never seen the film. One had been in a conversation with a co-worker about how much he loved the film. So the three of us decided to sit down together one evening and cross this 1967 classic off the list.

Cool Hand Luke revolves around a war veteran who winds up (after a drunken night destroying public property) serving two years in a Florida prison camp. That's the set-up, established five minutes into the film. And that's basically all the plot there is. Rather than tell any sort of unified, continuing story, the movie is episodic in nature. Like chapters in a book, or short stories serialized in a magazine, every 5-10 minutes of film brings on a new "adventure" in Luke's life at prison. The only real connection between any of them is a consistency of surrounding characters.

Those characters have plenty of interesting actors playing them, but are all flat and boring on the page and lifted up only slightly by the performers. There's star Paul Newman, full of wry smiles and dry line deliveries; he's playing himself more than a character, it seems. The prison captain is played by Strother Martin, whose quirky and high-pitched voice is the only thing going for him. George Kennedy is the de facto lead prisoner, but alternates too much between being a dim-witted fool and a bullying thug to be either sympathetic or menacing. Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton are both here, but this is before either was established, so they're little more than living set decoration here.

On top of the non-existent plot, there's the problem of the film's age. It has the languid pacing typical of movies made before the mid-70s. Even the more action-oriented segments simply aren't exciting. And then there's the radical change in the U.S. prison system over the past four-and-a-half decades. Granted, most modern prison dramas seem to be set in high security facilities, where this film is placed in a rather minimum security setting. Nevertheless, this prison just seems like a fairy tale environment utterly uncoupled from reality. Perhaps in 1967, this film was The Shawshank Redemption for its generation. Today, it just creaks.

Even the movie's one possibly redeeming quality isn't one I can praise with much enthusiasm. Composer Lalo Schifrin (famous for the Mission: Impossible TV series) composed a score with plenty of attention grabbing and unusual music. But too unusual, really, a weirdly dissonant collection of music not very well suited to the film at all.

I can say with certainty that had I been watching the movie alone, I never would have made it all the way through without giving up and turning it off. As it was, my two friends and I all suffered it together. I haven't been so bored by a movie in a long time. I can find no reason not to give it an F. I cannot begin to imagine what so many people see in this film.