Every Kurt Russell And Goldie Hawn Movie, Ranked According To Rotten Tomatoes

Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn are one of Hollywood’s most revered celebrity couples, and that point isn’t really up for debate; they’re two old-school Hollywood movie stars whose kids are also famous. With that said, are their on-screen collaborations any good? Sort of!

Russell and Hawn have been together since 1983, and their family has no shortage of superstars — their son Wyatt Russell is an actor whom you’ve probably seen in “Black Mirror,” “22 Jump Street,” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” and through Hawn Russell is a stepfather to Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson (their father is musician Bill Hudson). Famous shared family aside, Russell and Hawn have also been in a handful of films together; they actually met on the set of the lowest-ranked one on this list. Before you check them out, you might want to consider which Russell-Hawn films are a total skip and which ones you should actually watch, so here are all five Kurt Russell-Goldie Hawn films ranked by their Rotten Tomatoes scores (well, with one exception … you’ll see).

It feels like a little bit of a stretch to refer to the 1968 movie “The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band” as a collaboration between Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, considering that Hawn is credited as “Giggly Girl” and is basically a glorified extra. (To be fair, it’s also Hawn’s feature film debut.) Russell has a considerably bigger role as the teenaged Sidney Bower, who, alongside his siblings, sings in the Bower Family Band led by mother Calvin (Buddy Ebsen) and Katie (Janet Blair). (Future “Clue” star Lesley Ann Warren is also on hand as Alice. Here’s the gist: the Bower family band decides they wants to sing one of their songs for the President at the time, Grover Cleveland, at the Democratic National Convention, but face Republican opposition.

Basically, this movie is a worse “The Sound of Music” but with feuding American political parties instead of Austrian citizens and Nazis, and reviews reflected that. There’s no official Rotten Tomatoes score for “The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band,” but those aforementioned critics definitely didn’t like it very much. Renata Adler of The New York Times attended the initial screening at Radio City Music Hall and was pretty uncharitable, calling it “as pepless and fizzled a musical as has ever come out of the Walt Disney Studios.” Over at The Chicago Tribune, Clifford Terry wished the family would “shut their collective Von Trapp” and concluded that the film is “another Walt Disney studio production that isn’t designed to appease squirmy family audiences” that also happens to be “filled with a flurry of limpid songs.” Ouch. At least Hawn and Russell met for the first time on set.

Goldie Hawn’s first collaboration with Kurt Russell didn’t give her much screen time, but in the mid-1980s, they worked on two movies together that let them both take center stage. One is pretty good, and we’ll circle back to that. The other is “Overboard.”

You’re probably somewhat familiar with “Overboard,” but here’s a quick refresher: Hawn plays rude, entitled socialite Joanna Mintz Stayton, who hires local contractor Dean Proffitt (Russell) to completely redo her closet while her yacht is undergoing repairs. Joanna is predictably awful to Dean and the two argue — so when she falls off her yacht and develops amnesia after their fight, Dean … takes advantage of the situation. See, Joanna’s husband Grant Stayton III (the late, great Edward Herrmann) decides to completely abandon Joanna after her accident and keep her fortune for himself, so Dean decides to tell Annie that she’s actually his wife, and they have four children. If this sounds like a weird, upsetting, and consent-free situation, you’re not wrong. 

Not even director Garry Marshall and the combo of Russell and Hawn could make “Overboard” a critical success; as Rita Kempley wrote for The Washington Post, “If there’s an amnesia movie worse than ‘Overboard,’ it slips my mind.” Over at The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel made a pretty salient point as well: “Why [Kurt Russell] wouldn’t simply leave [Goldie Hawn] alone is just one of the film’s flaws.” To be fair, though, this isn’t the worst version of “Overboard” according to critics — Anna Faris’ remake in 2018 earned a dismal 24% on the review aggregator.

At a certain point in their career, it seems like every actor of a certain age does either a holiday movie or they do a movie for a streaming service. Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn managed to do both with their “Christmas Chronicles” films, which can exclusively be streamed on Netflix — and unfortunately, 2020’s “The Christmas Chronicles 2” didn’t fare quite as well with critics as the original. In the sequel, Kate Pierce (Darby Camp) and her brother Teddy (Judah Lewis) reunite with Santa Claus (Russell) and his wife Mrs. Claus (Hawn), and in this installment, they end up transported to the North Pole by the evil elf Belsnickel (Julian Dennison), a detail which makes it feel like Dwight Schrute wrote this movie. (He didn’t; it was directed by “Harry Potter” and “Home Alone” veteran Chris Columbus, who co-wrote the film with Matt Lieberman.) Also, Malcolm McDowell — yes, the guy from “A Clockwork Orange” — voices a Turkish forest elf.

“The Christmas Chronicles 2” scored a solidly middling rating despite all of these odd details with a “fresh” score of 64% — but a handful of critics were pretty harsh in their reviews, like Frank Scheck at The Hollywood Reporter: “Kids will eat it all up, but let’s face it, they also love the food at Chuck E. Cheese.” Still, the movie’s inherently sweet nature and the chemistry between Hawn and Russell still won over some critics. “So what if this holiday sequel plays like a mashup of random story threads,” Peter Travers wrote for ABC News. “Thanks to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Santa and the missus have never been this cool.” 

As is often the case, the original installment of “The Christmas Chronicles” was deemed better than its sequel — even if it’s a difference of three measly percentage points. Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn kicked off this two-film franchise in 2018 as Santa and Mrs. Claus, but first, the film introduces us to the recently widowed Claire Pierce (Kimberly Williams-Paisley, whom you might remember as Annie from the “Father of the Bride” movies) and her kids Kate and Teddy. When Kate and Teddy try to successfully videotape Santa to prove he’s real, the two end up in his sleigh and basically disrupt the Christmas space-time continuum (which is to say that the sleigh crashes in Chicago due to their presence). Also, Oliver Hudson, Hawn’s eldest son, is in this movie as Claire’s late husband, so that’s a cute cameo.

Critics more or less found “The Christmas Chronicles” to be pretty charming, if flawed and silly — which is fair, considering that Russell and Hawn are so fun on-screen together that pairing them up as Santa and Mrs. Claus is pretty ingenious. “The film’s no great shakes, but Russell’s star power in “The Christmas Chronicles” is a gift anyone should be happy to claim,” Melanie McFarland at Salon.com concluded. Also, a lot of critics just thought Russell as Santa was sort of hot; Emily St. James called his take on the character a “Santa who, in the parlance of the times, can get it” for Vox, and Karen Han at Polygon sort of agreed: “Hot Santa is a premise that requires a few risks, but this movie falls just short of making the leap. Still, the film has a few interesting points to make as to the way the idea of how Christmas has changed over the years.”

If you’re going to watch one collaboration between Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, it should be their 1984 drama “Swing Shift.” This wartime romance — directed by the late auteur Jonathan Demme — casts Hawn as Kay Walsh, a woman who goes to work in an armaments factory while her husband Jack (Ed Harris) ships out to Pearl Harbor after its attack got the United States involved in World War II. At work, Kay meets Lucky (Russell), who works in the factory by day and plays music by night, and though he keeps pursuing her, she tells him that she’s married. Things heat up between Kay and Lucky anyway, but when Jack returns unexpectedly, things get extremely complicated … I won’t spoil it here, but “Swing Shift” does not end in the way you might expect.

The movie earned a supporting actress nod at the 1985 Academy Awards for Christine Lahti — who plays Lucky’s erstwhile lover and Kay’s close friend — and the film got a solid response from critics. When the film was originally released, Vincent Canby at The New York Times wrote, “[‘Swing Shift’] offers Miss Hawn her best role since ”Private Benjamin,” and she is most winning,” and in 2006, Time Out reviewer Geoff Andrew agreed: “Hawn, atypically cast and supported by all-round excellent performances, proves that she can act.” While some critics just felt like a whole lot doesn’t happen in this movie — like David Denby for New York Magazine, who wrote in 2019 that the film “isn’t boring, but nothing in it startles, nothing explodes” — but by all accounts, it’s Hawn and Russell’s best film together.