Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) Since we're only a couple of hours away from attending a matinee of "No Time To Die", we thought this film's as good as any to use as our pre-'NTTD' post. .
As much as we've always liked and enjoyed 'Remo Williams' , we can't help wishing that it had turned out much better than it did..........
Its screenwriter and director came straight from the Bond Universe.....Guy Hamilton who helmed "Goldfinger", "Diamonds Are Forever", "Live And Let Die" and "The Man With The Golden Gun" and Christopher Wood, who penned the scripts for "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Moonraker"
The cast assembled for this was also top drawer......Fred Ward as Remo Williams, the rough, tough New York cop unwillingly recruited to become a stealth assassin of uppercrusters whom the law can't touch, and veteran stage actor Joel Gray as Remo's ancient, wise (and wisecracking) superhuman Korean trainer-mentor. Chiun.
(Please keep in mind that we realize this movie arrived decades before Joel Gray and the producers would be boiled in oil, crucified and burned alive for casting Gray as a Korean....)
Also along for this 'origin' story - the always reliable, cracker barrel character actor Wilford Brimley as Remo's avuncular boss and Kate Mulgrew as an Army major nursing an serious crush on our hero.
With the film kicking off with a wonderfully propulsive, exuberant theme by composer Craig Safan, you'd think you were in for a wild fun ride.
We wish......
Though it's loaded with humor and superb stuntwork, director Guy Hamilton never gets the film out of middle gear. The action sequences, of which there's not nearly enough of, play out with proficiency but very little urgency. And Hamilton's direction never rises above detached competence. It's as if he thinks he's phonfng in the 10th episode of a series instead of creating a sense of excitement necessary to push the first film off to a memorable start.
It also doesn't help that the movie only offers up a bland corporate villain as Remo's first official adversary, a conniving arms manufacturer played by Charles Cioffi.
And that may well be why this was the first and last of the Remo Williams film adventures.
But whenever the film pops up on TV or streaming channels, we can't help sticking around for the scene where Remo takes on three thugs atop the Statue Of Liberty (at the time completely surrounded with towers of scaffolding as it underwent repairs.) And we wouldn't miss the moment when our working-class 007 forcefully uses a villain's diamond tooth as a glass cutting tool to escape a death-by-gas trap.
We most definitely would've looked forward to seeing more better directed, further adventures of Remo Williams. But sadly this one's where it begins and ends. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
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