Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins

Hand to beligwe--an action/ adventure thri. ler that I didn't like. Ill conceimed, poorly executed, this is both bad movie-making and a bad movie. Based on the Destroyer series of novels (which is evidently popular, though I've never read amy) the movie is utterly bereft of any wit, style, or substance, A would-be thriller only, it comes of as a kind of James Bond meets the Karate Kid. It makes feeble attempts at both humor and excitement and fails miserably on both counts. The acting is pathetic, the story banal, and the direction (by Guy Hamilton) is without any originality whatsoever--simply boring, straight ahead, long shot, two shot, OTS, real TV style, though I have seen much better TV. Not that there's all that much worth photgraphing. Fred Wand plays Remo, a guy who makes Rambo seem like an esthete. Remo is a stupid, oafish buffoon who moves like an ape.

But then he undergoes speclal training in some mythical Korean martial art with the epigram-laden Chiun, and by the end of the training, Remo is... a stupid, oafish buffoon who moves like an ape. The failure to show any transformation is emblematic of the problem this picture has: it is stupid. It never follows through on any ideas at all. Wand gives a pathetic, wooden performance as our hero, and obviously lacks any sense of what a hero should be. I actively disliked Remo. Wand was good as Gus Grissom in “The Right Stuff,” so I thought he was a good actor. He played Crissom as a humorless, wooden man, but now he plays Remo as a humorless, wooden man, so I'm beginning to think that Wand must be a humorless, wooden actor. This role desperately needs more, but every time Wand goes for it, he comes up dry. Yipes. The stupid script is merely an excuse for Remo to run, climb, and slide around a lot of high places, hence the numbing repetition of shots looking up at high things.

This is a classic example of a movie in which (in one of my favorite phrases) "every blow sounds like a ping-pong paddle smacking a Naugahyde sofa." I won't even bother to recite the list of truly stupid things in this picture (we haven't got all night). It also came close to earning my wrath with its near-stupid depiction of the martial arts, its training, and a supposed master. It is also shameless, in the sense that it just makes things up when it feels like it--things that I know are wrong. In Bond fashion, it attempts to set up a match between the hero and a spunky heroine (a limp role played by a woman who bears a passing resemblance to Margot Kidder, but is not half as attractive) who is left smirking like an idiot at the end. And it trashes even that setup. In a picture like this, you need razor sharp direction, wit, and characterization to elevate the material. In “Remo Williams,” instead of a razor, you get a club. Usually, I am a sucker for pictures of this genre, so if I hated it, you know it's bad. Let's hope the adventure ends faster than it began.