Delayed Reaction: Popeye

Premise: Popeye the Sailor Man shows up in Sweethaven in search of his missing father.

It's funny how some of Hollywood's more famous busts weren't really the disasters they were made out to be. Waterworld was a famously difficult shoot that cost a reported $175 million. Yet, it managed to make $264 million worldwide. John Carter ballooned to $250 million but made $284 million worldwide. Cleopatra cost a staggering $44 million in 1963 but went onto a worldwide gross of nearly $60 million, making it one of the highest grossing films of the decade. All these movies lost money. Probably a lot of money. However, they were a degree of magnitude better than something like Heaven's Gate ($3.4 million box office vs. $44 million budget) or Mars Needs Moms ($39 mil Box Office vs. $150 mil budget), even though no one thinks of them as less disastrous. 

I mention this because Popeye has a reputation for being a bomb. It was expensive and not the out of the gate hit the studio wanted. Robert Altman just came off one of the most creatively successful and prolific decades any director has ever had in the 1970s, and Popeye was a perfect storm of troubling press. It was very expensive, a difficult shoot marred by drug problems, based on an odd choice of intellectual property, and a musical for some reason. It also came out on the heels of Michael Cimino's famous disaster, Heaven's Gate, which got every studio nervous about sinking too much money into projects for auteur directors. The oddness and expense of the movie made Popeye the kind of film for which the bad headlines were written before it even got released. Instead of totally flatlining, the movie made $60 million on a $20 million budget, got only somewhat negative mixed reviews, and has aged pretty well.

I dislike a lot of the same stuff that people did when Popeye was released. Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall's voice performances, while accurate, got really grating over 2 hours. The music wasn't Broadway caliber. The whole movie is just too dang silly without being funny. Despite how big everything about it was, I got bored by it; or maybe it was exhaustion. 

That said, I kind of liked the movie. Or, at least, I'm really glad I watched it. I really miss Robin Williams. That's still the celebrity death I took the hardest. I think this is the earliest movie I've seen with him, and it's so nice to see how full of energy he was. He was an irreplaceable screen presence. My absolute favorite thing though is that Sweethaven set. My god, that is one hell of a set. It's big. It's real. It's detailed. Few fictional locations have ever had such a sense of place. You can often feel the limits of sets like this one. I just rewatched the Tim Burton Batman, and it feels like Gotham city is only one city block large. I remember the Live Action Beauty and the Beast felt like the same three or four sets. However, Popeye feels like Altman could've shot that town from any angle and never exposed the facade. Apparently, the set still remains intact in Malta and is a popular tourist attraction. If I'm ever in Malta, I'd sure like to go.

For me, the good slightly outweighs the bad in this movie. I get why Altman spent several years in the woods after making this. If I was a studio executive, I wouldn't know what to do with him after that either. I like that he made it though. 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend