Nate and Hayes

This isn't a review, it's a sales pitch. If you love Indiana Jones, The Princess Bride or Pirates of the Caribbean, you must seek out 1983's Nate and Hayes on DVD. It doesn't have the budget of a Spielberg film, the idiosyncrasies of Rob Reiner's Princess or an off-the-rails performance like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, but it does have small doses of all three, while working entirely on its own, modest terms. In short, Nates and Hayes is a miniature-sized ass-kicker.

This film was obviously made in the wake of Raiders of the Lost Ark fever, but perhaps more interesting is Nate and Hayes' influence on several later, bigger-budgeted films. For instance, the collapsing bridge sequence from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is straight out of Hayes, preceding Spielberg's Raiders sequel by nearly a year. Meanwhile, the entire plot of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie is highly similar to Nate and Hayes.

In Nate and Hayes, a naive, attractive young couple is escorted by a rogue, sexy pirate named Captain Bully Hayes (played by Tommy Lee Jones) to a missionary assignment on an island, before their mission is thwarted and Hayes reluctantly teams up with Nate (Michael O'Keefe) to get back Nate's fiancee, Sophie (Jenny Seagrove), after a mass murder/kidnapping. What Nate and Hayes don't realize, however, is that Sophie is a formidable fighter herself and that they have little to worry about. Sounds familiar, right?

As expected, Bully Hayes turns out to be just a strange, misunderstood mix of eccentric scoundrel and well-meaning curmudgeon. He's toasty and hardened on the outside, but wait until you get to his gooey center. The truly bad guys in the film are Ben Pease (Max Phipps), his band of henchman, and the group Ben has teamed up with...which just happens to be the German navy. This last touch gives Nate and Hayes a very odd feel, combining old school pirates on the high seas with modern colonialism and technological warfare, circa pre-World War I.

Tommy Lee Jones is hysterical throughout, carrying the film in its few dull moments, while laying down the template for Depp's Sparrow, as well as Billy Bob Thornton's recent cottage industry career as a crusty, unapproachable dickhead. It's also worth mentioning that Jones has great chemistry with O'Keefe because, if this film had taken off at the box office, they could have made a great onscreen duo through many a sequel. Can't you just imagine Nate and Hayes 3: Show Me the Way to Go Home opening with Bully Hayes sighing, "I'm too old for this shit"?

All kidding aside, I have to warn you that the opening sequence of Nate and Hayes is very off-putting: Hayes helps slaughter an entire village of island tribesman, for no apparent reason. Even when the scene is given context, it still feels mostly random and unnecessary. Jones's performance and the pleasant light-heartedness throughout go a long way in minimizing this potentially disastrous opening misstep, but it's still a bit of a shocker to see a film's future protagonist blasting away at unarmed natives.

If you hate DVD extras, you're in luck because this disc has none. It's just pure TLJ, giving you all some TLC in his cream-colored pirate pantsuit. Oh, I just died in his arms tonight. It must have been something he said. And it all happened on the high seas. Actually, scratch those last few sentences. My enthusiasm got away from me there. Still, I highly recommend Nate and Hayes for a lazy Saturday afternoon, if you're going through withdrawal from a morning of cartoons or just need a swashbuckling pick-me-up. -- Jason Woloski