Batman’s boffo loomed large over the 90s, and Hollywood spent most of the decade scrambling for the next big superhero blockbuster franchise.
They clearly didn’t know what worked.
But they read down the checklist at least as far as Art Deco aesthetic and a classic IP grandpa would approve of. While Underoos A-listers like Superman and Spider-Man were doomed to sit out the decade, the focus on crime-busters and mystery men from the Pulp era seemed the perfect way to infuse some nostalgia into the mix.
Dick Tracy, Zorro, The Shadow, along with loving tributes like Darkman, The Mask, and The Rocketeer, all threw their silhouette on the silver screen with wildly varying degrees of success. The Phantom was the last one through the door, arriving in June of ’96 making $23 million against a $45 million budget, and that was that.
But if you’ve ever watched it and felt like something was slightly off, there’s a reason for that. Jeffrey Boam, the guy who wrote Last Crusade, developed the screenplay with Joe Dante as a tongue-in-cheek spoof. They were weeks away from shooting in Australia when Paramount pulled the plug over the budget and – if Dante is to be believed, and I always believe Joe Dante – the presence of a winged demon at the climax. Dante walked and the project sat on the shelf until it was revived under director Simon Wincer. Yet nobody involved seemed to fully grasp that the script had been written as a comedy. The humour is still woven into the structure, into setups and scenes that feel like they should land as badum-tss punchlines, but Wincer lets everything run completely straight.
You’re essentially watching a comedy that doesn’t know it’s a comedy. The gap between what Boam and Dante were doing is what ended up on screen.
Even though the Ghost Who Walks didn’t jibe with audiences at the time, I’ve always had a soft spot for the breezy serial swagger of it. The whole thing is still steeped in its pulpy Lee Falk origins and Billy Zane is clearly having the time of his life in that purple suit.
That kind of unironic enthusiasm was in short supply in a decade that spent most of its energy trying to be darker and edgier. It deserves a place on the shelf somewhere between Mask of the Phantasm and Mystery Men. -Pop