A quick confession before we start: Other than my rewatch of it last night, I hadn’t seen The Phantom since it came out way back in June, 1996. My love for the character means I’m pretty sure I saw it opening weekend. There I was, 19 years old, watching Billy Zane squeeze himself into that skin-tight purple suit and punch pirates in the face. But then… thirty years of nada. Not a rewatch. Not even a late-night cable stumble. Just a vague memory of a guy in a wetsuit-looking purple get-up and a villain who seemed like he was having an absolute blast.
So I rewatched it, just for the heck of it. And I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either. But I didn’t hate it enough not to write a blog post about it. So here it is. And if you’re a fan of the film, try not to crucify me for expressing my true feelings.
The Review
First, some context for the uninitiated (and if you’re uninitiated, fix that): Lee Falk‘s The Phantom debuted in newspaper strips in 1936. This character predates Superman. Predates Batman. Kit Walker — the 21st in an unbroken line of jungle-based masked heroes — is arguably the original costumed superhero, the “Ghost Who Walks,” a man who cultivated the myth of his own immortality by simply never dying in anyone’s lifetime. Sort of.
The strip is still running. It’s one of the great unsung achievements in comics history, and Falk never gets enough credit for what he created.
Which makes what Paramount did with it in 1996 both understandable and slightly frustrating.
The film is set in 1938, which is the right call. Bengalla jungle, New York City, air pirates, a secret skull-shaped island fortress — it’s got the bones. Director Simon Wincer (who came in after Joe Dante bailed, which… hmm) shoots the whole thing with a bright, earnest, Saturday-matinee sincerity that you either find charming or insufferable depending on your mood and blood-sugar level.
The MacGuffin is three mystical Skulls of Touganda, which, when united, give the wielder some vaguely defined destructive power. Fine. Whatever. MacGuffins are MacGuffins. Xander Drax — played by Treat Williams -who revels in his role as a villain in this — wants them. The Phantom wants to stop him. Kristy Swanson‘s Diana Palmer gets kidnapped in the middle. The plot is… it’s there. It exists. It connects scene A to scene B with reasonable efficiency and asks nothing of you intellectually.
But that’s kind of the problem.
My Gripes
A) The Story Is Way too Thin. Not bad, exactly. Thin. There’s a version of this film where the generational mythology — centuries of Phantoms, fathers passing the mantle to sons, the weight of that oath — becomes genuinely moving. This version skips past it. Patrick McGoohan shows up as Kit’s dead father to offer some ghostly advice, which is a great idea used in the most perfunctory way imaginable. Two scenes. A pep talk. Gone. The strip is about legacy and sacrifice and the loneliness of that mission. The movie treats it like a plot footnote.
B) 1996 Wanted Dark, And Nobody Told The Phantom. Here’s the context the film couldn’t escape: this was the post-Batman Returns era. Audiences had decided superhero movies should be brooding or they should be camp, and The Phantom was neither. It wanted to be Raiders of the Lost Ark in a purple suit. An honest-to-God adventure serial played straight. In 1989, that might have worked. In 1996, it made $17.3 million worldwide on a $45 million budget. The market had its say.
C) The Villain Deserved More. Treat Williams (hero of DEEP RISING, a favorite of mine) is clearly having the time of his life, and that’s lovely, but his character Drax is a bit of a vacuum. He wants power. He has henchmen. He does villain things. That’s it. And then there’s the Singh Brotherhood — a centuries-old pirate organization that’s been the Phantom’s nemesis since basically forever — who are reduced here to hired muscle. The Singh Brotherhood being used as nothing more than goons. One of the great recurring antagonists in pulp history, demoted to background thuggery. Sheesh.
What Put a Smile on my Face
Here’s what works, though. And I’m not damning with faint praise here, I mean it.
a) Billy Zane is genuinely good. He trained hard for that suit, and it shows — not just physically, but in how he carries the character. There’s a relaxed confidence to his Phantom that actually fits the strip’s version of Kit Walker, a man so secure in his mission he never feels the need to prove anything. It’s a quieter kind of heroism than the era demanded, and Zane sells it. Genuinely.
b) Catherine Zeta-Jones as air-pirate Sala is an absolute delight. She was twenty-six years old and already had more screen magnetism than most of the people she shares scenes with. You watch her and you think, oh, yeah, she’s going somewhere. She did. But here she’s having fun with a part that could’ve been nothing, and she makes it into something.
c) The production design is legitimately eye-popping. The 1930s New York stuff, the Bengalla jungle sets (shot in Thailand and Australia), the Skull Cave — it all feels crafted. There’s a tactile quality to it, practical and physical, that a lot of modern superhero films have completely abandoned and I’ll never stop being annoyed about that.
Wrapping Up
So The Phantom might not be a great film. I even hesitate to put it in the class of The Shadow and The Rocketeer from the same era. But sitting with it thirty years on, I found myself charmed in a way I didn’t quite expect. It’s honest about what it is. It’s not trying to deconstruct anything or comment on anything or set up a cinematic universe (God, what a concept that was in 1996). It just wants to be a pulp adventure about a man in a purple suit punching criminals in the jungle.
Sometimes that’s enough. Not always. But for me, during this rewatch, it was.
They were never going to make a sequel, were they? Seventeen million dollars made sure of that. Which is a shame, because there’s a version of this franchise — leaner, meaner, trusting the mythology more — that could’ve been genuinely great. What a missed opportunity. But the same can be said of The Shadow and The Rocketeer, I guess.
If I had to rate it I’ll give it 6 out of 10 skull rings. See it if you haven’t. Remember it fondly if you have. Just don’t go in expecting Raiders…
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