The Forgotten Mick Jagger Movie That Makes 'Spice World' Look Like 'Citizen Kane'

In the social media age, it can be tempting to wonder if we see our favorite icons showing off and airing their dirty laundry online a bit too much. It might feel like TMI is the hallmark of the post-Twitter age, and something specific to post-Millennium living, but if you look back at celebrities just a few decades ago, you'll find that there's always been a general crying out for attention. It just used to come in much stranger, less fun-to-watch forms.

The latest example of this that we've managed to unearth is a movie titled Running Out of Luck (1987), starring then-megastar-couple, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall (as themselves), alongside Dennis Hopper (as a "video director"), all running around Rio de Janeiro being utterly insufferable. Running Out of Luck isn't simply one of the most bizarre feature-lengths ever committed to film, it makes Spice World (1997) look like Citizen Kane. It also forces the viewer to wonder aloud questions like:

"Did I need to see Mick Jagger's naked butt cheeks, mid-coitus?"

"Is Jerry Hall the worst actress literally ever?"

"Why is Mick Jagger licking that poor woman's face like that?"

The answers are: No, Yes, and AAAAARGH.

Here is the opening scene in all of its turgid glory. (Warning: contains naked breasts for absolutely no reason whatsoever):

To make matters worse, Running Out of Luck is so consistently and obliviously offensive, one gets the sense that -- like so many other, more famous celluloid efforts from the 1980s -- no one on set had even the slightest inkling they were doing anything wrong. You think pop stars have the power to offend now? Try watching something co-written by a 1970s rock star in the decade before political correctness became a thing.

While hilarious, imdb's plot summary -- "A rock singer goes to Brazil to shoot a video, but winds up getting kidnapped and turned over to the over-sexed owner of a banana plantation" -- really doesn't amplify the awfulness of this thing enough.

For a start, it fails to mention any of the following:

1. Gratuitous toplessness in the opening scene.
2. Jagger calling Hall a "bitch" repeatedly during the first 10 minutes.
3. Jagger getting beaten and robbed by three male robbers dressed as female groupies.
4. Jagger's casual use of the racist slur, "dago."
5. A scene that relies almost entirely on an angry black woman trope.
6. Mick Jagger acting out slave-like conditions on a plantation, under the control of a woman with a whip.
7. Mick Jagger literally being raped by said plantation owner (we hear him say "No more, no more" at one point). It is supposed to be funny.
8. Gratuitous use of a little person in the plantation barracks scene to make the place seem "crazy."
9. A scene in which a brutish man is persuaded out of raping a woman because Jagger gives him some stripy espadrilles.
10. The fact that Jagger's love interest remains without a name throughout the movie and is named (no, really) "Slave Girl" in the credits.
11. One of the most repulsive -- and surprisingly graphic -- love scenes in music film history (Jagger's creepy fingers and waggly tongue are everywhere).
12. Jagger spends the whole movie trying to get to a phone. When he finally finds one, he says into it: "Collecto. Reverso chargo. Yeah.”

To put this in modern terms, imagine if the Twitter accounts of Iggy Azalea, Snoop Dogg, and Azealia Banks all got together and made a movie, and you have some idea of the level of preposterous entitlement on show here.

To give you a better idea of the production values involved, here's a scene in which Jagger has been lost in the desert for one day, getting soaked by what appears to be a watering can, followed by the angry black woman bit, some really bizarre capoeira, and the arrival of his future rapist:

There are also random curveballs throughout, like the fact that Jagger spends the majority of the movie "acting" like it's a normal movie, only to sporadically break out into song, so that this interminable project might provide a few music videos. There's also a bit where he goes to a store and tries to prove he's Mick Jagger by putting on a Rolling Stones record and miming along (no one believes him). In another scene, Jerry Hall throws furniture out of a hotel window and into traffic for literally no reason.

Put simply, the majority of this film just doesn't make any sense at all. On top of that -- the plot thickens! -- its Wikipedia summary is currently made-up nonsense written in broken English, which might just be the greatest thing to come out of this entire project.

Running Out of Luck was co-written and directed by Julien Temple, a respected music video director of the time, who worked with everyone from Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson to Tom Petty, Duran Duran and David Bowie. He also directed Sex Pistols classic, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), and ridiculous '80s Jeff Goldblum vehicle, Earth Girls are Easy (1988). We can probably place a good 50% of the blame for this movie with him.

So next time you think a pop star or an actor has done something really embarrassing online, just think back to Running Out of Luck, and recall that this was the type of thing celebrities used to have to do because they didn't have the ability to just get it out of their system with a silly YouTube video. More than likely, if it had happened in 2017, Running Out of Luck would've been a 7-minute-long Funny or Die short. It could've saved everyone involved a lot of time and humiliation.