By Paul Andres Jonassen
As every true fan of the Phantom should know, 2006 marks the 70th Anniversary of our hero. However, what seems to be forgotten by most people is the fact that 2006 ALSO marks the 10th Anniversary of Paramount Pictures’ movie The Phantom, which, as we all know, starred Billy Zane in the lead role, and featured Kristy Swanson as Diana, Treat Williams as bad guy Drax, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Sala, the aviatrix.
Unfortunately, it’s a well-known fact that the film didn’t fare very well at the box office in the US, earning only 17 million dollars back of its budget of 42 million. Even more unfortunately, Paramount seemed to give up on the film after it bombed in the US, and didn’t do very much to promote it in the rest of the world. The Phantom has millions and millions and millions of fans in Europe, India, and Australia. These places could have given the film a second chance, and who knows, maybe we had seen the two sequels that Billy was signed on to do. Many fans have dismissed the film since it was released. Opinions are mixed, as the case is with most comic book/strip adaptations (or any other film, for that matter). Billy Zane’s received criticism from some fans for being too much of a merry-man, and the general, light hearted tone of the film have been panned by many who wants to see a darker, more mature approach to their hero.
Well, what would be the point of writing this article without me trying to – at least to a certain point – defending the film? I’m not necessarily going to say that you have to give the movie a new chance, but I can give it a shot.
OK, here we go (again):
I am personally quite fond of the film, and have been ever since I watched it for the first time as a nine or ten-year-old boy. Back then; it was probably the coolest movie I had seen since Star Wars flew around on the TV-screen. I though the action was outstanding, the acting was great, and that the story was the coolest thing since the Force was with me. Billy Zane became my hero, and I still remember thinking of James Cameron’s Titanic as a huge disappointment when I saw it back then, because I didn’t like seeing the Phantom himself being the bad guy.
As you grow older, and hopefully more mature, things like these changes. Today, Star Wars is nothing more for me than a memory of the past; I regard Titanic as a true masterpiece of big- budget filmmaking. I still read Phantom comics with the same enthusiasm as I did back then. I still happen to really like the Phantom movie.
First of all, there’s this very feel good, um, feeling. It’s impossible to see this film with a cynical eye and still enjoy it. Yeah, the Phantom does talk with the ghost of his dead father; and sure, it is plain stupid. Yeah, Xander Drax is a pretty useless bad guy, camping it all up a notch too much. And yeah, the story is not necessarily the cleverest one; with everyone looking for a weapon of doom which turns out to be a pretty boring laser.
But hey, here are some of the main reasons why I nevertheless really enjoy the flick:
1. Billy Zane. The guy is just amazing as the Phantom. Like Michael Keaton in the Batman films, he did very much with very little. On the script page, the role may have looked a bit flat. Zane, who looks like he’s been cut out of an old Sy Barry story and pasted onto the cinema screen, manages to make the hero interesting and appealing simply with his deep voice (his voice is much deeper when he plays the Phantom than what Zane sounds like in real life), a body language carefully copied from the strip after hours and hours of studying, the charm and humor that Lee Falk himself wanted from his hero, and a body so intensely beefed up that he could probably beat both Stallone and Schwarzenegger in a bar-fight.
Some fans criticize him for “grinning too much”, which I find quite strange. The Phantom smiles all the time in Sy Barry’s stories. According to people who knew him, Lee wanted his hero to be charming and smiling.
As for the fact that some people don’t think he wasn’t a menacing enough as the Phantom, just keep in mind that Billy could only do so much with the script he was given. The character wasn’t written as a very frightening one here, but look at the scene near the ending where he reclaims his father’s belt from James Remar’s excellent bad guy Quill. If that’s not a threatening Phantom, nothing is.
Zane easily outshines his entire supporting cast. Kristy Swanson; never heard from again since this film, is nothing more than OK as Diana, and Treat Williams is a pretty useless bad guy as Xander Drax.
After his major role in Titanic, the world’s most commercially successful film, Billy have kind of slipped off the mainstream radar, and seems to focus on small independent movies, some really good, and some so bad that they are hard to get through. Today, he gets more publicity for dating Kelly Brook than what he does for any of his movies.
He is the kind of guy who could easily have been an A-list movie star, but probably doesn’t care enough of fame to give it a serious shot. How else can you explain that he went from doing Titanic to shooting a film written by legendary turkey-maestro Ed Wood called I Woke Up Early The Day I Died? Zane is a talent just waiting to be re-discovered by Hollywood, and I am looking forward to the day it eventually happens.
2. Fun! Action! The movie’s got a very joyful, sunny feel to it, and it clearly wants nothing more than entertain its audience. It doesn’t strive to take up real world issues like the DC Phantom series or Falk and Barry stories from the eighties and onwards. What it does is to stay relatively close to the feeling of adventure and constant danger that was one of the strip’s trademarks in its earliest, Ray Moore-influenced years.
Some of the action is terrific… The moments with the Phantom coming to get the intruders in his jungle paradise in the beginning is great (“Watch him Devil, he moves, eat him!”).
The scene with the truck on the bridge, very much inspired by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is very exciting. The scene where the Phantom dangles outside a plane, jumping onto Hero, is flawed, but works quite well nevertheless. The fight scene between Kabai Singh and the Phantom is excellent, albeit a little too short, and it is a joy
seeing Zane kicking the crap out of the Singh… excuse me, Sengh-pirates near the ending. The fight between Quill and the Phantom is not quite as intense as it should have been, considering that Quill killed the Phantom’s father, but is quite good anyway.
Not to forget the fact that the Palmer’s butler is named Falkmoore, and the gangster who is pierced by Drax is named Ray. Nods like that always fare well with comic fans!
3. The supporting players. Overall, the movie has a pretty decent cast. As mentioned above, I think Kristy Swanson is a bit bland as Diana, and Treat Williams wouldn’t appear menacing to a baby. Then again, there are plenty of good actors here:
Catherine Zeta-Jones is perfectly cast as Sala, the aviatrix. Afterwards, she has been the only member of the cast; possibly expect Zane, to really rise to fame. She totally outshines Kristy Swanson’s Diana in every scene she’s in, being sexier, more interesting, and generally being a better actress.
Cary Tagawa, who plays Kabai Sengh, looks like he’s really enjoying himself. It is a shame that the filmmakers didn’t ditch Xander Drax completely, leaving Kabai to be the main villain. I mean, who cannot love a baddie who is proud to speak of himself as eeeeeeeeevil? Even though he is so wicked (shooting a man with a cannon is not the nicest thing to do…), he never goes totally over the top like Drax.
James Remar as Quill makes a terrific opponent for the Phantom. The fact that he is the killer of his father adds certain intensity to the story that the filmmaker sadly didn’t use enough.
There are also actors in very minor roles that stand out: Bill Smitrovich and Samantha Eggar as Dave and Lily Palmer only have very minor roles, but they are both excellent in them, pretty much nailing the personalities of the newspaper characters (even though in the movie, Uncle Dave is a newspaper editor). Jon Tenney plays lazy playboy and potential Phantom-alter ego (you know the story) very well, and even looks quite a bit like the character from the strip. Robert Coleby is excellent in his tiny role as Captain Philip Horton of the Jungle Patrol.
The film’s got many flaws and shortcomings, though. The examples that stand out for me personally, follows:
The origin is waaaaay too brief. The famous pirate attack is poorly realized, without any intensity whatsoever. And where on earth was the skull oath, on which the entire world of the Phantom is built?
Having the ghost of the Phantom’s father appear to give him advice now and then is plain stupid. If dead people can really come alive as real ghosts, then what is the point of The Ghost Who Walks? Besides, McGoohan is terribly miscast. Even when he was younger, he wouldn’t have looked right for the role, and being at least over 60 when the movie was made… No, just wrong
It was a major mistake to leave out so many interesting scenes, which developed the characters a bit more. We have read plenty about them in interviews. I guess they wanted the movie to be more fast-paced, but some stuff in the movie seriously suffers from the deleting; like the romance between Kit and Diana, which never really takes off (except the wonderful scene at the beach near at the end of the film). You also have to wonder why director Simon Wincer left out some stuff that sounds primarily like action-filled scenes, like the Phantom fighting a snake, wrestling a lion, and the stunning shot of the Phantom on a rearing Hero which was shown at the end of A&E’s Phantom biography.
But seriously, I really like the movie. Unlike many comic book adaptations I have seen, it respects the character, unlike movies like Spawn and Batman and Robin. I firmly believe it is one of the best comic adaptations the world has seen this far (but that’s not very difficult, since most of them are crap anyway).
I personally think fans should watch this film taking it for what it actually is, rather than what I could have been. For a new movie, I’d like to see a low budget approach to the character, with a more mysterious, frightening Phantom, lurking around in the jungle shadows taking out the bad guys one by one; scaring the crap out of them… I keep wondering whether we will actually see a new Phantom movie or TV-series one day. Fingers are definitely crossed, although any actor following him will have a hard time beating Billy Zane. I would kill to see the guy, who looks pretty much like he did back in 1996, get another opportunity to play the character. After all, “No one refuses the Phantom!”
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