Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford starring in the same movie should’ve been a ’90s cinematic event. Their 1997 action thriller, The Devil’s Own, had all the right ingredients. It featured two A-list stars, a director with serious chops, and a politically charged IRA storyline. On paper, it looked like the kind of movie that would dominate both the box office and late-night cable rotations for years.
Instead, the film became one of the decade’s forgotten titles. Despite grossing over $140 million worldwide, it never really clicked with audiences or critics in the way everyone expected. Why? Production troubles weighed down its reputation, clashing creative visions, and a final cut that felt totally confused about what story it even wanted to tell. Looking back, it’s a wild case study in how even one of the best Hollywood pairings can face-plant.
Behind the Scenes of ‘The Devil’s Own’ With Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford
To understand why this movie fell so far down the pecking order, one has to look at the troubled production. This whole thing started as Pitt’s brainchild. His character, Frankie McGuire, an IRA gunman laying low in NYC under the alias Rory Devaney, was supposed to be the white-hot center of a tense thriller about loyalty and violence. However, Ford later signed on to play Tom O’Meara, the unsuspecting NYPD cop who takes him in. So, to accommodate his presence, the studio expanded Ford’s role massively and rebranded the project as a two-hander between two titans.
Simply put, that’s where the wheels started to come off. While filming, filmmakers tore the original script by Kevin Jarre to shreds. A fact that Pitt famously griped to Newsweek about: “We had no script. Well, we had a great script, but it got tossed for various reasons.” Ford pushed for his cop to be more of a morally complex family man, while Pitt was fighting to keep the hard-edged political story front and center. Director Alan J. Pakula, the genius behind All the President’s Men, was suddenly stuck playing referee. He was caught between two mega-stars with two completely different movies on their heads.
That behind-the-scenes drama bled into everything. Shooting went way over schedule, and the budget ballooned to around a whopping $90 million. Additionally, they had to scramble to reshoot the ending just weeks before its release. Ford later told Esquire that the whole experience was “complicated,” which is basically A-list actor code for a total nightmare. Despite the chaos, one can still see glimpses of the great movie that got lost in the shuffle. The dinner scenes with Ford’s on-screen family are dripping with unease, and the quiet moments between the two leads crackle with a mutual respect that makes their inevitable betrayal actually hurt. In those scenes, fans get a peek at the powerful character study that was buried under last-minute rewrites.
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How ‘The Devil’s Own’ Became One of the ’90s Most Overlooked Thrillers
By the time The Devil’s Own hit theaters in March 1997, critics were underwhelmed. Consequently, it received a grim 37% on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviews that praised the acting but destroyed the jumbled story. The late film critic Roger Ebert nailed it when he essentially argued that the film was structurally problematic, even though both stars managed to make the best of a bad situation. The box office told the same story. That more than $140 million global haul looks fairly good on paper, but a domestic take of just over $42 million was a straight-up disappointment for two guys at the absolute top of their game.
The timing was also off. Audiences in the late ‘90s were all about the big, dumb, fun action of Con Air or the slick sci-fi of Men in Black. As such, a gloomy, morally gray political thriller seemed out of place. Even Pitt’s committed-but-wobbly Irish accent became a go-to punchline. Yet for all its flaws, there’s still something weirdly compelling about this movie. The moral ambiguity that pissed off critics in 1997 feels way more at home in today’s golden age of antiheroes. Pakula’s direction and Gordon Willis’ cinematography give the whole thing a gritty, atmospheric weight that holds up. When it works, the core conflict between Ford’s weary cop and Pitt’s conflicted fugitive packs a real punch.
Watch The Devil’s Own on your next movie night. Look past the messy production and see the story beneath it. Then decide for yourself: forgotten misfire, or underrated thriller that deserves another shot?
