Clearly, there can be no higher public good than convincing the world that certain famous, successful people deserve to be much more famous and successful than you dum-dums have made them so far.
Thus I'll now earn my way to Heaven by unveiling the first in a sporadic, possibly never-to-be-revisited series on The Underappreciated Works of Fred Ward: 1985's Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.
New York City cop Ward is unwillingly recruited into a classified organization devoted to taking down powerful threats to American justice. Its next target: shady arms contractor Charles Cioffi, whose exploitation of the U.S. military is killing innocent soldiers.
Remo Williams is based on the Destroyer action novels, a series I am familiar with from my bookstore days. They're sort of the male equivalent of category romance, except instead of dashing Spanish barons and hidden pregnancies you've got Chinese vampires and secret martial arts. As a result, I expected heavy cheese from the movie.
Instead, I got a funny, inventive espionage flick from director Guy Hamilton and writer Christopher Wood, two guys with multiple Bond flicks under their belts. Between them, they throw Ward into countless strange dangers, including dangling from an extreme Ferris wheel and a fight on the scaffolding around the Statue of Liberty. This thing has more climbing than the second floor of King Kong's House of Ladders.
So we've got the requisite but cool action setpieces and the gradual unfolding of the big dirty scheme. What sets Remo Williams apart is Joel Grey as an 80-year-old Korean.
A racially questionable casting job, but then again the character is a master of the art of Sinanju, a made-up bullet-dodging martial art that combines equal parts ninjitsu, proto-parkour, and Jackass, so we're not exactly holding hands with reality here. Besides, the guy has great lines, such as when he derides Ward's physical prowess with "I can see the deadly hamburger has done its evil work."
By length, Remo Williams is almost half student-master training sequence. This is another way of saying half of it is guaranteed to be great. Even better: Ward and Grey's martial partnership isn't just thrilling, it's hilarious.
When a movie makes the most of every scene like that, that's a movie you need to see. Remo Williams may not have the most distinctive villain, and his master plan often feels like an afterthought. But both the action and the comedy hold up. It's far more obscure than it deserves to be.
* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com
