Nate and Hayes (1983)

I like to think I know where I stand with a movie when I walk in.  When Nate and Hayes was over, I wasn’t exactly sure.  This is one of the dumbest most incomprehensible piles of collected plot rip-offs that I have ever seen.  It’s tone changes from one moment to the next – at one point it is a farce, the next moment it’s a serious action picture, the next I don’t even know what.  Even its title sounds ill-advised – Nate and Hayes sounds like a law firm.

The movie doesn’t have a plot so much as a pile of run-off that exists somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Captain Blood and featuring 18^th century characters who never-the-less banter like the celebrity hosts of “The Hollywood Squares.”  It deals with a missionary named Nathaniel “Nate” Williams (Michael O’Keefe) who is travelling to an island with his fiancée Sophie (Jean Seagrove) aboard a ship captained by William “Bully” Hayes who has a reputation so rough that one man says “He’s ruined the seas.”  Was he dumping toxic waste?

Sophie is kidnapped, not for any functional reason but just because she’s a beautiful woman an action movie.  She is taken by a slave trader named Ben Pease (Max Phipps) and so Nate and Hayes go off on a high adventure to try and bring her back while at the same time working through a rivalry over who would claim her.  This means lots of witty banter, knowing winks and pre-formed stunt work.

What follows is really much ado about nothing.  It’s all a bunch of set pieces and ideas stolen from old pirate movies.  Nate it marooned.  Sophie becomes a sacrifice.  Hayes has an uneasy past with Ben.  And none of this comes to anything.  I’m bored just writing about it.