John Cusack and Ben Stiller landed early roles in the little-seen teen comedy, Hot Pursuit – from the maker of Tron. We take a look back. Unless you have a particular obsession with 1980s movies, there’s no particular reason why you should see Hot Pursuit, an entirely forgettable comedy adventure from the second half of ... Hot Pursuit | Revisiting a half-forgotten teen comedy from the director of Tron
John Cusack and Ben Stiller landed early roles in the little-seen teen comedy, Hot Pursuit – from the maker of Tron. We take a look back.
Unless you have a particular obsession with 1980s movies, there’s no particular reason why you should see Hot Pursuit, an entirely forgettable comedy adventure from the second half of the decade that taste forgot. But at the same time, it has some fascinating details in it, not to mention the odd little mystery, such as: why does the film’s central family, essentially its McGuffin, have the surname Cronenberg? Why would the director of Tron, one of the early 1980s’ most groundbreaking and downright eccentric mainstream movies, decide to make something so… conventional?
In many respects, Hot Pursuit is a typical film from the era of teen movies ushered in by filmmaker John Hughes. It has a good-hearted young protagonist who can’t stay out of trouble; stuffy, authoritarian grown-ups who seem clueless about everything going on around them, and a far-fetched plot that takes in light action set-pieces and some really odd incidental characters.
John Cusack, who made his debut in the tawdry 1983 comedy Class, gets his first lead role here as Dan Bartlett, a working class teenager who’s managed to get into a prestigious boys’ school on a scholarship. His girlfriend, Lori Cronenberg (Wendy Gazelle) has invited Dan on holiday with her upper class family, who are moneyed enough to be able to afford to spend the Easter break in the Caribbean.
For convoluted reasons we won’t lay out here, Dan misses the plane bound for the West Indies, and then spends the bulk of the film trying to catch up with Lori and her family, whose tour of expensive hotels and yachts leave him constantly several steps behind. Along the way, Dan meets an assortment of stock characters and stereotypes, including Keith David as a local Caribbean man who carries a machete, and Robert Loggia as a salty sailor named Mac.
Meanwhile, Lori avoids the sleazy advances of deckhand Chris, played by Ben Stiller in one of his earliest screen roles – and then there’s a third-act swerve involving pirates and machine guns.
Director and co-writer Steven Lisberger came up with the concept for Hot Pursuit after he’d made Tron for Disney – a sci-fi fantasy that failed to strike gold at the box office in 1982 – and seemingly based the story on his own experiences, if an old LA Times piece is accurate.
One of the people instrumental in getting Hot Pursuit made was screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, who liked Lisberger’s script and managed to help convince Paramount boss Ned Tanen to stump up the additional budget the project needed to get off the ground.
Mankiewicz wrote about Hot Pursuit for a page or two in his 2012 memoir, recalling that the script was first brought to him by Canadian producer Pierre David. At that point, the story was set in Mexico rather than the Caribbean, but Mankiewicz recalls liking the concept and helping Lisberger work on it further.
David and Lisberger had already managed to garner the interest of RKO Pictures, but the storied studio was only willing to stump up $2.8m to make it; a meeting was therefore set up at Paramount, where Mankiewicz managed to get Tanen to sign off on the extra $1.2m within a few seconds.
“We’re asking for a million or two,” Mankiewicz recalls saying to Tanen, “or slightly less than you’re going to spend on the wrap party for 48 Hrs. II.”
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“Yeah, you got it,” Tanen shrugged. And that was that.
Mankiewicz also writes that the Dan Bartlett role almost went to Anthony Michael Hall, another actor closely associated with John Hughes movies, including Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club; instead, the production went for Cusack – then a somewhat less famous member of the so-called Brat Pack who’d also made a brief appearance in Sixteen Candles.
Rounding out the cast, you’ll find a fascinating mix of older-generation actors. Playing the stern family patriarch Bill Cronenberg is Monte Markham, a veteran of TV and film who comes from the same crisp, stoic school of acting as Richard Crenna – so much so that there are sequences in Hot Pursuit where it feels as though Colonel Trautman has walked in from the Rambo franchise. You’ll also find Jerry Stiller, father of Ben, in a truly odd role as a flamboyant holidaymaker with a dark side.
Then again, this is also an odd film for the above-mentioned producer Pierre David, who in the 21st century has been behind a string of TV movies with such titles as Web Cam Girls, Murdered At 17 and Snatched From The Crib. In the 1970s and 80s, he helped David Cronenberg bring several of his early body horror classics to the screen, including 1979’s The Brood, 1981’s Scanners and 1983’s Videodrome.
It’s a fair bet that the Cronenberg family name in Hot Pursuit was David’s idea.
Released in May 1987, Hot Pursuit emerged in a year dominated by comedies and thrillers; Three Men And A Baby, Fatal Attraction and Beverly Hills Cop II topped the US box office, while the period’s more high-profile flops included that summer’s Ishtar and Jaws The Revenge.
Far from a financial disaster, Hot Pursuit just about made its $4m budget back in cinemas, and no doubt found prolonged life on VHS, but it didn’t exactly capture the public’s imagination. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the movie falls somewhat between two stools. Although parts of it haven’t aged too well, it’s certainly isn’t as bawdy and tasteless as other teen comedies of its vintage; there’s none of the gratuitous nudity of Class, an experience that actor Virginia Madsen found so unpleasant that she later said of her co-stars, “Those guys were assholes… It was bad. Bad memories.”
But neither is Hot Pursuit the sweet, easy-going comedy romance hinted at in the opening reel; instead, it flits from madcap comedy to survival to machine-gun toting action, with Cusack seemingly ill at ease with the shifts in tone, and the filmmakers unable to stage the action itself with much panache; one standout is a brief yet awkwardly-choreographed fight between Cusack and Ben Stiller’s douchebag antagonist.
LA Times critic Michael Wilmington picked up on the tonal shifts in his review at the time of release: “Romance and comedy are dumped in favour of carnage,” he wrote; “a self sabotaging decision for what might have been a cute, enjoyable movie.”
Hot Pursuit was one of a string of teen movies Cusack made in the first decade of his career, when he was seemingly in danger of being typecast as characters like the hapless Dan Bartlett. As well as his parts in Class and Sixteen Candles, he’d also played a libidinous teen in Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing (1985) – and by the end of the 1980s, he was so weary of those types of roles that he was initially reluctant to appear in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. Cusack, Crowe later told the LA Times, had to be convinced that it wouldn’t be another “zany high school movie.”
Cusack eventually agreed to play likeable slacker Lloyd Dobler, and the result was one of the most celebrated performances of his career up to that point.
After Hot Pursuit, Lisberger directed just one further film: 1989’s Slipstream, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller with a particularly turbulent production story (and the same cinematographer: Frank Tidy). When asked why he stopped directing after his third feature film, Lisberger said in 2011, “I didn’t feel confident enough in finding a script or a story that could compete with Tron… I realised that I liked directing in the Tron style where it was iterative. It was animation and special effects and it was on a lot with a team of people who worked together.
“Where I was going with directing was much more like the hired gun. You’re the director, they hire you. You walk into a movie that’s going, they hand you a script and that didn’t feel comfortable to me. So I focused on [screenwriting].”
Hot Pursuit remains an odd footnote in film history. It’s not forgotten, exactly; it had a Blu-ray release via Kino Lorber in 2024, and the nature of the internet being as it is, there are bound to be people out there who insist it’s one of the best comedies ever made.
Interestingly, it isn’t a film its cast or crew have brought up in later interviews – all except Ben Stiller, in a 2014 Reddit AMA, jokingly wrote, “You probably know me from Next Of Kin with Patrick Swayze, or Hot Pursuit where I play the bad guy.”
Regrettably, nobody asked Stiller about the film he brought up in the comments – or that awkward fight between he and a young John Cusack…
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