YMMV / Hudson Hawk

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Every cappuccino machine seen in the movie — a three foot tall bronze R2-D2 looking contraption. These days, most espresso machines are more bread-box sized affairs in a console orientation. The ones used in the film are of the vintage Bezzera/Pavone type.
• Ass Pull: Tommy surviving the explosive car crash. Even with all the lampshading and the attempted handwaves such as airbags and sprinklers, it's still too unbelievable that he would survive such a thing.
• Awesome Music: Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello show they have awesome pipes with their singing of "Would you like to swing on a star..."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There's one part where the Candy Bar Brigade are sitting in a car outside Anna and Hudson's apartment and, apropos of nothing, Butterfinger says "Want me to rape 'em"? Presumably this was an attempt at Black Comedy, but it just seems so out of place and rather out of character for Butterfinger as well. The other bad guys just roll their eyes and tell him to keep reading his picture book, and the whole thing is never brought up again.
• Critical Backlash: Hudson Hawk was raked over the coals by critics when it was released. They thought it was an absolutely terrible action movie. Many viewers since have, however, noticed that it is a pretty darn good comedy, which is what its creators intended all along. It has also found an audience among anime fans due to the startling number of parallels to Lupin III.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mute henchman Kit-Kat is one of the movie's most beloved characters despite his supporting player status due to being a delightfully quirky Punch-Clock Villain played by a young David Caruso.
• Fridge Brilliance: Tommy and Hudson know a series of songs's playing times by heart. They sing songs during robberies, not just to time them, but to stay in sync. Songs are sung during the auction house robbery and the Castle Da Vinci assault, but not during the Vatican job, because that one is only done by Hudson — there's no one else to sync with.
  • Not only that, but their timing and estimates are so perfect, that they inevitably get foiled right after they finish the song.
• Fight Scene Failure: At one point when Butterfinger "punches" somebody, his fist clearly goes in front of the person he's "punching". They try to hide this with the camera angle but it's still painfully obvious.
  • When Hawk smashes Butterfinger's head into the phone booth, the window is clearly sugar glass (some really bad sugar glass at that).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film was incredibly popular in Japan due to similarities to Lupin III.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Eddie's quest for a cappuccino becomes highly ironic in an age with a Starbucks on every street corner.
  • At one point, Kit Kat is trailing Eddie and mimics every movement Eddie makes, including at one point pulling a pair of sunglasses. This was years before Kit Kat's actor David Caruso would make pulling sunglasses a trademark move of his character Horatio Caine in CSI: Miami.
• Magnificent Bastard: George Kaplan is a charming CIA operative who works with the villainous Mayflower couple as their primary heavy-lifter. Having gotten the infamous master thief "Hudson Hawk" thrown into prison by manipulating him before the story's start, Kaplan further plays Hawk by gaining incriminating evidence and forcing him to be the Mayflower's pawn in stealing prized artifacts for them. Serving as the voice of reason to the Mayflowers' psychotic theatrics, Kaplan ends up utterly trouncing Hawk in a physical fight despite his elderly age, and is only killed by a series of coincidences, leading to his death that he faces by merely bemoaning the loss of his pension.
• Narm Charm: "Looks like you won't be attending that hat convention in July!" Is it a stupid line? Absolutely, but it totally does sound like the kind of lame "that sounded better in my head" quip that somebody would make up on the fly.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • David Caruso? YEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAH! And he's in a dress? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
  • Almond Joy is Queen Vee.
• So Bad, It's Good: Those who don't find it an irredeemable mess that mixes bad action, bad comedy and annoying characters, like because aside from actual entertaining moments, they can laugh at how incompetent the thing is.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The combination of action and slapstick, the main character being a Gentleman Thief and the overall feel of the film has some people calling it a better live-action Lupin III movie than the actual live-action Lupin III movie.
• Squick: The Mario brother who gets stabbed in the face with a rack of syringes. And seems to be almost unfazed by it a couple scenes later, though his partners freak out when they see his face.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Most of the cast is hamming it up or otherwise not taking the movie seriously, but James Coburn plays the role of George Kaplan almost entirely straight — which, ironically, makes him one of the most consistently funny characters in the movie.
• Uncertain Audience: Ultimately, the film's downfall can be attributed to the marketing team trying to cater this film towards an audience it ultimately was never intended to directly cater to. The advertising and other marketing for the film gave off the impression that the film was going to be an action adventure type of story. In practice, the film was actually more of a comedy that parodies musicals, action adventure films, and spy flicks. And as a result, the audiences who came to see the film expecting an action adventure were left disappointed by the noticeable lack of action, critics were unfairly harsh towards the film (to the point it won the Worst Picture Razzy for 1991) due to it completely failing to deliver on what it had sold itself to be, and comedy audiences who might have been able to appreciate the film for what it actually was ultimately started dropping by to see the film too late to save it from its ultimate box office fate and current reputation due to having already been alienated by the misleading marketing.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film was made in 1990, and could only have been made in the late 80s or early 90s.
  • Cappuccinos are treated as an exotic beverage, clearly before Starbucks put them on every street corner.
  • Nintendo is so modern that Eddie doesn't even know what it is^note The company has been around since the 19th Century, but didn't become a household name in the U.S. until the Nintendo Entertainment System was released.
  • Plenty of jokes about Yuppies.
  • The CIA agents miss communism. Also Kaplan making a joke about the younger agents he is handling by saying that "I call them the MTV-IA", back when MTV was brand new and selling itself as "the renegade cool kid on the block" and definitely long before its Network Decay in The New '10s.

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