Taglines: When the going gets tough… the tough take the law into their own hands.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man movie storyline. The tough biker Harley and his no less tough cowboy friend Marlboro learn that an old friend of theirs will lose his bar, because a bank wants to build a new complex there and demands 2.5 million dollars for a new contract in advance. Harley and Marlboro decide to help him by robbing the corrupt bank. They rob the Bank transport and get hold of an amount of a new synthetic drug. Now they are targeted by criminal bankers.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is a 1991 action biker film starring Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson. The film was written by Don Michael Paul and directed by Simon Wincer. The film was a critical and financial failure, earning only $7 million at the domestic box office (the budget was estimated at $23 million). It became a cult classic following its release to video. It promoted a “male biker” stereotype.
jh4>Film Review for Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
“Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” is an old-fashioned buddy adventure updated to the year 1996, possibly to distance it still further from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which it calls up without profit to itself. The film opened at theaters here yesterday.
Mickey Rourke, sporting a punkish haircut, one earring and a cross around his neck, is nicknamed Harley Davidson because he rides one. Don Johnson also rides a Harley, but he’s nicknamed the Marlboro Man. He affects the look of a cowboy from his hat down to his boots, and always has a cigarette in his mouth.
Boyhood pals who now drift through life, usually alone, sometimes together, Harley and Marlboro join forces to save not the old homestead but their favorite hangout, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Bar and Grill, which is on a small piece of valuable Burbank, Calif., real estate. The bank is foreclosing.
They and some other of the bar’s regulars hold up an armored car, winding up not with the $2.5 million they sought but with a suitcase full of crystal dreams, the name of the drug of choice in 1996. The rest of the film is a series of special effects designed to dramatize the confrontations between the amateur thieves and the professional drug dealers.
Mr. Rourke and Mr. Johnson handle their roles with more ease and humor than can be accommodated by a movie so stuffed with mindless fistfights, gunfights, helicopter chases, explosions and leaps from tall buildings. The camera doesn’t even pay much attention to the many beautiful women who are placed around the movie as sex objects.
Prominent in the supporting cast is Daniel Baldwin, who is a clone of his brother Alec and frequently looks like a 1996 fashion plate. His most striking garment: a shiny black floor-length, long-sleeved bulletproof vest, made out of something identified by one of the characters as a Japanese variation on Teflon. The coat swirls gracefully around the body without inhibiting the movement of the arms in a gunfight. The movie also ill-uses the Japanese in other ways.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991)
Directed by: Simon Wincer
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Don Johnson, Chelsea Field, Tom Sizemore, Giancarlo Esposito, Vanessa Williams, Robert Ginty, Tia Carrere, Julius Harris, Eloy Casados, Kelly Hu
Screenplay by: Don Michael Paul
Production Design by: Paul Peters
Cinematography by: David Eggby
Film Editing by: Corky Ehlers
Costume Design by: Richard Shissler
Set Decoration by: Lynn Wolverton-Parker
Art Direction by: Lisette Thomas
Music by: Basil Poledouris
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date: August 23, 1991
Hits: 90
