In Like Flynn

Synopsis: Errol Flynn’s fictionalized account of his pre-Hollywood days in Australia as an adventurer.

I’m not sure what director Russell Mulcahy had in mind with this film whose title co-opts Errol Flynn’s legendary reputation as a top-notch Hollywood pantsman but which no more than abuts the actor’s career in Tinseltown of the 1930s and ‘40s. 

Instead, the potential appeal to older audiences of the Golden Era icon of their younger days is almost entirely ignored in favour of a Raiders Of The Lost Ark style adventure yarn suited to, well, whom? Frankly, I don’t know. Even if family movies were not a thing of the past, brothels, opium dens and bloody fisticuffs are hardly suited to the demographic. Teen and post-adolescent audiences are unlikely to recognize Flynn’s name but without his beaming image hovering over proceedings Thomas Cocquerel is too lacking in matinee idol charisma to hold an audience’s attention. On the other hand Mulcahy doesn’t go for pop cultural make-over or CGI-enhanced hair-raising stunts to appeal to the action movie crowd.  The only real achievement of the film seems to be that it whets the appetite for the wicked romp it should have been (a rather wishy-washy end-title to Mulcahy’s film explains that its title was earned by Flynn’s reputation as a “hard-drinking ladies’ man”)

Based on Flynn’s 1937 autobiographical novel, ‘Beam’s End‘ and credited to four writers including Flynn’s grandson, Luke, who also executive produced, the film follows a hazardous expedition by sloop from Sydney to Papua New Guinea by Flynn with three shipmates in search of easy money. Mulcahy begins with a preamble recounting how Flynn originally heard about the gold while acting as scout/guide for a Hollywood film crew doing some location shooting in the jungles of PNG (Queensland in reality). This opener is a bit of a worry, not so much for the meagre equipment being used, no more that a hand-held camera that, improbably, works after being dunked in a river, but its hokey Saturday matinee style.

One hopes that, as is so often the case with this kind of fare, Mulcahy’s camera will pull out to reveal that what we are seeing is a spoofing simulacrum of an old school Hollywood adventure film.  But no, this is the actual story and Mulcahy stays in the same Boy's Own Adventure mode as Flynn puts together his unlikely team (played by co-writer and producer Corey Large, who looks disconcertingly like Tom Sizemore, along with William Moseley and Clive Standen) and the lads go in search of gold back in the PNG jungle, encountering and besting various ne’er-do-wells along the way.

None of this is particularly engaging with David Wenham unconvincing as a shifty (and weirdly moustache’d) Townsville boxing promoter and Grace Huang even less effective as an evil Oriental pirate matriarch. Whilst Cocquerel lacks Flynn’s effortless screen charm, a deficiency which you’ve got to say is a problem, Standen is a head-turning presence as the Robert Newtown-style salty dog, Charlie, although his piratical growl was so thick that at times I missed what he was saying, especially unfortunately in the climactic scene towards the film’s end in which he bares his soul to his shipmates.

As the old adventure films of the type that would make Flynn a star such as Captain Blood (1935) and probably his most memorable film, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), depended heavily on well-worn underpinnings it behooves anyone delving in the area to come up with some new way of dealing with the material as Spielberg did with the Indiana Jones films (although even these ran out of puff and finally crash-landed). But this Mulcahy does not do (with exceptions such as the bar-room fight in Townsville) in what is a surprisingly humourless film.  Compounding the issue, Peter Holland’s widescreen cinematography is incongruously silky, composer David Hirschfelder’s music uncharacteristically saccharine (bar that climactic scene already referred to) and the film has too many moments that could have been taken from one of the many self-conscious period pieces that Australia was making in the 1970s (and from which, somewhat ironically, the director notably departed with his 1984 feature debut, Razorback).

An opening title tells us that In Like Flynn is “a mostly true account of the Hollywood star’s early adventures” but there’s the problem – who will be interested in Flynn before he was a star or whether his adventures were true or not? Had Mulcahy retro-fitted Flynn's screen image to his youthful adventures In Like Flynn might have worked.  As John Ford, a director who knew a thing or to about putting together a good yarn. famously said: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

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