Past Their Prime: Peter Hyams

Tom Maguire
28 Sept 2005

It's a sad fact that many creative individuals lose their touch at some point in their careers. One theory behind this phenomenon is that every so often successful and talented artistic individuals are replaced by alien clonebots who look, sound, and act like the very humans they've replaced. Like Pod People, these human-like replacements have none of the creative vision, talent, or motivation that their human originals once possessed. The other less exciting possibility is that these people simply loose interest in their work as they get older and just don't know when to quit. Focusing specifically in the area of film directing, this series of articles will look at examples where for whatever reason, these "people" are working past their prime.

Peter Hyams... or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Career Timeline

Notable Films 1978-1994:
Capricorn One (1978) - Hanover Street (1979) - Outland (1981)
The Star Chamber (1983) - 2010 (1984) - Running Scared (1986)
The Presidio (1988) - Narrow Margin (1990) - Stay Tuned (1992)
Timecop (1994)

Beginning of The End 1995 - 1999:
Sudden Death (1995) - The Relic (1997) - End of Days (1999)

Point of No Return 2001-Current:
The Musketeer (2001) - A Sound of Thunder (2005)

The career of director Peter Hyams contains one particular point of interest that makes him unique among his Hollywood peers. For most of his career, since 2010 in 1984, Peter Hyams has functioned as his own Cinematographer. Because of this his films have maintained a singular look and feel over the years unlike that of almost any other director of his time. A Peter Hyams film looks like a Peter Hymas film. His signature style carried with it a virtual brand recognition that his films would be slick, well shot, entertaining pieces of Hollywood product. Unfortunately this has not held true of late. Arguably cracks started to show in 1992 with Stay Tuned and 1994 with Timecop. At least Timecop contains some vintage high kicking leg splitting Jean Claude Van-Damme action. But it's been pretty much downhill from there with Hyams and Van-Damme reteaming a year later for the Die Hard in a hockey arena Sudden Death. Basically an "I want my kid back!" movie, it contains very little in the way of Jean Claude dispensing any of his typical Van-Damage. Hyams followed with the even more disappointing monster movie The Relic. Of the Five Letter Monster Movies that ended in "ic" that year, Mimic was surprisingly far superior. End of Days, although relatively superior to the films that came immediately before and after in Hyams oeuvre, was still pretty limp in it's attempt to make Gabriel Byrne a believable Satan or that he could be so easily defeated by "The Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Musketeer isn't even worth mentioning, mainly because I couldn't make it past 20 minutes without flushing the DVD down the crapper. And as for A Sound of Thunder, Matt handles that one in his own unique fashion in his Review/Warning - A Sound of Thunder.

Check out Peter Hyams full list of credits at The Internet Movie Database.

-tm