Bird on a Wire (1990)

Bird on a Wire arrived in 1990 with two enormous stars, a Hans Zimmer score, and a title borrowed from a Leonard Cohen song, performed here by Aaron Neville. The film assembles these assets into a road movie about a man in witness protection who is recognized by an old flame, after which everyone runs, drives, and occasionally flies. The reviews were brutal and largely correct. One critic suggested the picture should have been sold in a plain white package labeled simply Movie. It opened at number one and grossed over $138 million against a $20 million budget, which settles the question of what it was for.

The social ledger is blank. Goldie Hawn plays an attorney with a career, and the screenplay converts her within twenty minutes into a hostage who screams on cue. Mel Gibson trades her watch for a car. Nobody in the production regards this as a problem, and the film offers no framework for doing so. Bill Duke and Clyde Kusatsu appear in supporting roles, incidental casting with no commentary attached. A character with dementia functions as an obstacle, a man who cannot remember the protagonist and therefore cannot help him, which is a plot mechanism and nothing more. The camera lingers on the stars' bodies in the manner of a swimwear catalog, which is exploitation and not empowerment, and the film knows the difference well enough to keep its tongue in its cheek.

The final act releases zoo animals, kills a man with a tiger, drowns another in a piranha pool, and electrocutes the villain on a collapsing bridge. This is the film's entire value system: escalation, spectacle, and a yacht at the end. The villain is a drug-dealing former DEA agent, a crime story convention and not a critique of anything. No argument is being made about money, power, identity, or the planet. It is a 1990 studio vehicle that has aged into a document of what studios used to buy, and it leaves the classifier with nothing to record.

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