Paramount went big on The Phantom in 1996, timing the movie to the comic strip’s 60th anniversary, launching a “Slam Evil!” campaign, and hoping Billy Zane’s masked hero would kick off a trilogy. Audiences had other plans. The film flopped, the sequels vanished, and the Ghost Who Walks drifted into the same cult-adventure territory occupied by The Rocketeer and The Shadow. Today, the funny thing is how refreshing its failure can look.

Set in 1938, the story finds Kit Walker (Billy Zane, Titanic) serving as the 21st man to wear the Phantom’s mask, protecting the jungle island of Bengalla as generations of Walkers have done before him. Raiders led by Quill (James Remar, What Lies Beneath) are searching for one of three mystical skulls that supposedly grant enormous power when united. Their boss is New York tycoon Xander Drax (Treat Williams, Smooth Talk), which eventually pulls Kit out of Bengalla and into Manhattan. Along the way he crosses paths with newspaper heiress Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), while the ghost of his father (Patrick McGoohan, Scanners) keeps showing up with the kind of advice dead parents apparently reserve for inconvenient moments.

Simon Wincer (Quigley Down Under) shoots the whole thing like a 1930s cliffhanger serial, and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, who also wrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, keeps the story moving through jungle temples, biplanes, speedboats, secret caves, and fistfights. The Thai locations are genuine, the stunts have weight, and the whole production has an old-fashioned physicality that gives even its sillier moments some charm. 

Zane, as is often the case, understands exactly what movie he is in. Kit is decent, square-jawed, and refreshingly uninterested in brooding, and this Phantom prefers disarming opponents to killing them. Zane first encountered the comic while making Dead Calm in Australia and has continued to call Kit one of his favorite roles. That enthusiasm comes through. Catherine Zeta-Jones (Side Effects) has even more fun as Sala, a sky pirate working for Drax, two years before The Mask of Zorro made Hollywood understand just how naturally she fit a swashbuckler. The trouble is that not every cast member finds the same wavelength. Swanson never quite clicks with the pulpy tone, leaving the romance flatter than everything around it, and several gags stop scenes instead of helping them along. Williams, on the other hand, seems delighted to play Drax as if subtlety were a personal insult, which is the correct approach.

The Phantom is too corny to work for everyone, but its corniness feels less embarrassing now than it probably did in 1996. It is colorful, sincere, practical, and completely committed to being the kind of adventure movie where a guy in a purple bodysuit can ride a white horse out of the jungle and nobody asks him to explain himself. I respect that.