Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins 4K 1985

Why tactless? Because the way Remo was recruited is, of course, quite something. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Who exactly is Remo Williams? Well, he’s yet another product of the pulp fiction world—those softcover sci-fi, thriller, and detective novels where such legendary figures as Conan, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and others got their start. However, unlike the aforementioned, Remo didn’t see the light of day in the 1930s, not during the dawn of superhero masks and capes, but in the 1970s, when James Bond’s imperturbable smirk was already hanging over the world, which is why this series of novels leaned toward a sort of espionage.

So who else to call to the director’s chair but Guy Hamilton—the director not just of several Bond films, but of *Goldfinger*, which for me is not only the best Bond film, but also one of my all-time favorite movies. Yes, of course, Hamilton’s work noticeably declined in the subsequent installments—but the spark hasn’t gone out yet, has it?

So here’s the thing—it doesn’t seem to have lost its spark. ‘Remo Williams’ is not the smartest, but overall an entertaining action movie that doesn’t particularly try to deal with the realism of the scenes shown on screen (there will be dodging bullets and running on water too), but it handles their spectacle quite well. Sure, there aren’t any mind-blowing chases or cities getting blown up—but there’s shooting, there’s fighting, and there’s balancing on the Statue of Liberty—it’s all here. Of course, despite the antics of Remo and his mentor Chiu—a superhuman in the flesh—there won’t be any cyborgs or anything like that here (as far as I’ve heard, there was something like that in the books); the sci-fi element here is somewhat down-to-earth.

Despite the smoothing out of some plot corners in the sci-fi elements, I still have questions about certain scenes—for example, why Kilpatrick’s character rushed into the pressure chamber in that scene. He could have just stood there, waited three minutes—and everything would have been fine. And it would have been more interesting to learn more about Williams’s life before he was recruited. Everything happens so fast, you don’t even have time to blink. But then they show the training sessions with Chiun in much greater detail, and how his friendship with Remo began. I have no questions about that part.

Even though the adventure ended before it really began (the film wasn’t a big hit), I still found it quite entertaining. And I’ve always liked Fred Ward for his down-to-earth, no-nonsense demeanor—his lack of any pretentious, showy, or forced coolness—and here he’s back in his usual element: baffled by what’s happened to him, he slowly starts to accept it and train—what else could he do? It is what it is. So here’s what we have—an entertaining little action flick for an evening, something to sit back and, as they say, “zone out” to. You won’t get much out of this film, but I don’t really see anything superfluous here either.