The SmarK DVD Rant For Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins

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– Now if that isn’t the most arrogant title you’ve heard out of Hollywood in a good long while, I don’t know WHAT is.

So anyway, this is hardly a new release (in either theatrical or DVD release sense of the term) but it took two months to get here because of my misadventures with Ebay, and I really feel it warrants a review, so there ya go.

But first, a word on Remo Williams, the character.

Created in 1972 by Warren Murphy in the pulp adventure classic, “Created: The Destroyer”, Remo Williams has been featured ever since in a continuing series of novels called The Destroyer, which are currently at #132 and I have somewhere between 100 and 110 of them sitting in a pile on my bookshelf. The books are part Mack Bolan adventure novel, part pop culture satire, and part political commentary. They are all very, very funny (well, from about #12 or so onwards the original ones were pretty bland) and written extremely tongue-in-cheek, substituting fake celebrity names to avoid lawsuits. I was originally hooked onto these books a couple of years ago by my friend Jody, who was always talking up “The Destroyer” and I was politely blowing him off, until I was browsing through one forced on me and connected the main character, Remo Williams, with a movie I had seen when I was about 10 years old. Suddenly, I was very interested, and accumulated a huge collection of the books, which I’m still reading at the rate of about one per week to this day.

In 1984, a movie version was finally done. The books were in the mid-40s by that point, I believe. The results were met with mixed reviews, to say the least

The Film

His name was Remo, and this was his movie.

First of all, the title SUCKS. What was wrong with “The Destroyer”? Sums up the character nicely, has some good menace going on, fits on a poster. “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” puts all the focus on Remo and is basically saying “Ha, we’ve already got a sequel planned!”, which kind of made them look stupid in the long run.

“Remo Williams”, at its core, is the story of a government super-assassin trained to kill without the need for guns or weapons of any kind. This by itself would lead to a pretty cool action movie, but there’s much more to the character than that. I’ll give you the backstory from the books, which is only barely brushed on by the movie.

In the early 60s, President Kennedy realized that organized crime and corruption were overrunning the United States, and he could no longer keep up with the criminals within the bounds of the Constitution. But to break it would be to admit that the very principles of the country’s founding were flawed, so he came up with a third alternative — CURE. Not an acronym, but a cure for the sickness ailing the country, CURE would be answerable to no one, given all the power of the government’s computer and intelligence networks, and be funded through so many backdoor and invisible channels that only two people would ever be aware of its existence: The President and the Director of CURE. To run the new government branch, the President hand-picked from the bowels of the CIA the most bureaucratic, unimaginative, single-minded (and yet fiercely patriotic) man in America, Harold W. Smith. He was given one man to assist him, war comrade Conrad McCleary, and unlimited financial resources to run down the criminal element. Unfortunately, that proved to be not enough, as the courts still proved susceptible to bribes and police proved not to be bulletproof, so crime still held the advantage. And in fact, Kennedy himself was killed as the ultimate proof of that. So 10 years later, CURE was granted an enforcement arm — one man — who would have carte blanche with regards to the law and would enact revenge for the country where legalities could not. That man was Remo Williams. None of this was explained in the movie, but it’s implied in some of the dialogue, so knowing it will help clear some things up before you watch.

Now, here’s where the books and the movie start to differ, specifically with the recruiting of Remo. In the books, McCleary meets him in Vietnam, and his real name is Remo Williams and always had been. Orphaned at birth and raised by nuns, he had no family, and was a fearless killing machine who followed orders to the T but had some trouble with authority. Having decided that he was their man, they follow his career to his after-war life as a beat cop in New Jersey, and then frame him for killing a drug pusher. His resulting trial is the speediest in US history, and he is sentenced to die by the electric chair and all appeals are denied. They rig the execution, however, leaving another corpse in Remo’s place, and erase his fingerprints and identity from the records forever, making him a walking dead man with no family or connections to anyone. He is left as simply Remo, using a variety of last names based on literally thousands of fake IDs given to him by CURE for every occasion (many of which are running gags in the books, like when he was “Remo Buttafuocco” for two or three books and could never remember how to spell his own name). That’s the books.

In the movie, he is Sam Macon, a beat cop in New York who is chasing thugs one night and finds himself ambushed by them, before being pushed into the river by a mysterious van. He wakes up in a hospital, with plastic surgery having transformed him into a new person, and the name “Remo Williams” bestowed upon him by Conrad McCleary, who unceremoniously reads it off a bedpan.

Now, call me crazy, but I preferred the book’s version of things, as do most fans of the character. What happens next follows very closely to the books, however. Sort of.

Remo meets Harold Smith, head of CURE, which is based in an innocuous bank (for some reason they changed it from the books, which has always had CURE based out of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, NY), but which oversees everything done by the government via computers. Wilfred Brimley plays Smith, and he’s TERRIBLE for the role, not only completely wrong in physical stature and age, but either he or the screenwriters completely butchered the basic nature of the character. Brimley plays him as an embittered and crusty pencil-pusher who swears, and that’s not Smith. Smith should have been more patriarchal, more tight-assed, and overall more dull and lemony. William Daniels from St. Elsewhere seems to be the consensus choice. Smith is the kind of person who shows up at EXACTLY 6:00 every morning, and penalizes those who show up late for wasting money, and those who show up early for trying to steal from the system. He is a bureaucrat to the core, and Brimley is none of those things.

Anyway, Smith explains the basic situation to Remo and sends him on his first assignment as the enforcement arm of CURE — killing what seems to be a harmless old Korean man in an apartment building. This meeting goes much like the books, as the Korean turns out to be very much not harmless. This would be the introduction of Chiun, and this is where the movie really starts to take off. Played by Joel Grey with HEAVY makeup, I had apprehensions coming in about how well he could pull off the transformation, but it’s truly amazing and he NAILS the character almost perfectly. Chiun is the master of Sinanju, the sun-source from which all other martial-arts flow. Unfortunately the book doesn’t go as much detail on the history of Sinanju as the books do (for obvious reasons) but the short version is that it’s a village in Korea that has trained assassins who have worked for the greatest rulers in history (and killed the greatest rulers in history) for thousands of years. Sinanju begins with breathing, and utilizes the full potential of the human body, which means that someone who masters the artform can do, literally, anything. Chiun looks like a fragile old man, but he dodges Remo’s bullets and deftly dissembles the gun right in Remo’s hand, as Remo flops around the room like a ragdoll trying to get a shot off. Chiun is actually there to train Remo as the super-weapon for the government, and that begins a wonderful relationship which is only touched in the movie. The period where Chiun begins attempting to take the white out of Remo also showcases the attention to detail the screenwriters actually took with regards to preserving things from the novels, as details that no one but fans would care about are all there. Chiun’s obsession with American soap operas, his insistence that Remo only eat rice to cleanse the hamburger from his system (past the first few books, in fact, Remo was physically unable to eat anything but rice and fish because of his body’s rejection of Western chemicals), Chiun’s bizarre habit of referring to Smith as “Emperor” (which is never explained in the movie but is an eternal running gag in the novels), a passing reference to Chiun’s gold (again, only mentioned once here, but a central part of his character in the novels that all fans instantly got) and Chiun’s rambling fortune-cookie philosophy are all featured in a short span and are all taken verbatim from the books. Chiun’s character is a tad, shall we say, toned down for the sake of political correctness, since he’s normally a raging racist and misogynist, although they touch a little on both things here.

Now, with a newly-created superweapon, you need a supervillain, and that unfortunately is where this movie kind of falls apart after a promising start. Instead of one of the colorful characters from the books like Chiun’s evil nephew Nuihc, or Remo’s evil opposite Jeremiah Purcell, or Russian superbabe Anna Chutesov, or even megalomaniac supercomputer Friend or crazed theme park magnate Uncle Sam Beasley we get a slightly corrupt weapons manufacturer. Oooo. The worst direct act of evil he commits is manufacturing a defective gun and then not telling anyone about it. CURE decides to stop him because he’s wasting government money, and Remo is given the green light to do so by any means necessary. In the books, Harold Smith wouldn’t even BLINK at that sort of emergency, and would consider it a complete waste of his time.

Unfortunately, there’s more flaws from there.

An action set-piece involves Remo battling three goons on the Statue of Liberty to showcase his fear of heights. Nice idea, but Remo Williams doesn’t HAVE a fear of heights. He doesn’t fear anything, that’s why they picked him. I guess the writers wanted to bring a human element to the character, but it doesn’t need one — his smartass attitude and big mouth get him into enough trouble. Plus he dispatches the goons in ways that Remo would NEVER do — he doesn’t use weapons, and he doesn’t leave witnesses alive.

Next problem — there’s a female lead, Kate Mulgrew, playing a nosy Major who is on the same track as CURE. She serves no purpose here other than exposition and playing damsel in distress, and it’s annoying. The movie kind of touches on the subject of sex, but it’s only PG so it can’t really go into the same detail that the books do. So let me explain — Sinanju not only offers ways to kill a man, but ways to pleasure a woman. Specifically, 37 simple steps that reduce the act of sex to a series of pressure points beginning with the wrist. This has two side effects for Remo — 1) Sex no longer holds any interest for him and he only does it when he needs something from the woman, and 2) Women go crazy for him wherever he is, resulting in much annoyance on his part. The movie turns this into a running joke, as a horny Remo constantly demands of Chiun to know the secrets of the steps. At any rate, because women serve no useful purpose to Remo any more, generally anyone of the female persuasion who isn’t a recurring character winds up dead by the end of the book. Mulgrew, however, is very much alive by the end of this one.

Also, the movie isn’t nearly violent enough. Remo Williams is an ASSASSIN. Chiun is an ASSASSIN. They kill people for a living. Some of the bad guys get pretty harsh deaths, but Remo is not a nice guy who picks and chooses according to the moral high ground. Many people cross his path and Harold Smith generally has no moral ambiguity about ordering the death of ANYONE who might possibly interfere with a mission. And Remo (and especially Chiun) have even less ambiguity about carrying those orders out. That’s a dynamic that the movie barely touched on, but deserved to be explored further. Smith and McCleary know exactly what they’re getting into and are willing to kill themselves rather than have CURE be compromised. Smith, in fact, carries a pill at all times, just in case. It’s coffin-shaped, by the way, a detail which the movie sadly omits. And in fact, when McCleary is compromised while on a mission with Remo, he has to make the ultimate sacrifice, and does so without hesitation. (Sidenote: They REALLY messed up that whole plot thread here, as the original book has a totally different meaning behind his death, especially with regards to Remo. And the movie version of his demise is, shall we say, much more G-rated than the gruesome self-inflicted death in the book, which REALLY drives home how much he cared about national security. I’ll say this much about it — in the movie he has a wooden arm, while in the book he has a sharpened hook for a hand. Use your imagination from there). But the point that this movie kind of scratches but never really explores is this — these are people who deal in death every day, and beyond Remo’s fancy new balancing tricks and bullet-dodging, he’s a guy who mercilessly kills people, with his bare hands, every day, and will do so until deemed no longer useful by his superior, at which point his life will be forfeit. I really wish they would have gone down that road instead of opting for the generic 80s “chase down the bad guy” sequence.

Oh, and one final pet peeve — the wardrobe is total wrong. Remo has a variety of outfits throughout the movie, but all he ever wears in the books are chinos, a t-shirt, and expensive Italian loafers. Same for Chiun — he has a variety of exotic Oriental outfits in the movie, but he would never wear anything other than a kimono.

This movie, however, does a lot right. Fred Ward absolutely gets Remo Williams dead on. I personally tend to picture Bruce Campbell when I’m reading the books, but he wasn’t around in 1984, so Ward does fine. The relationship between Chiun and Remo, ending with Remo calling Chiun “Little Father”, is what makes the constant death and violence of the books so bearable, and the same holds true here. They both have their moral center in each other. And believe it or not, there’s some of the wittiest writing I’ve seen in a B-level action movie here, from Chiun’s insults to Remo’s one-liners to a HILARIOUS sequence involving some REALLY tenacious guard dogs. Given a bigger budget and some better villains, this would really be an A1 action movie. In fact, if ever there was a movie that BEGGED for a remake with the overused Matrix effects, this is the one. Maybe someday — talks have been ongoing since 1999. You can follow things at www.sinanju.com, in case you’re interested in learning even more about the players in the books and want to read the wisdom of Chiun.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, but I have a deeper perspective on the characters thanks to the books. For casual action fans or 80s nostalgia buffs, I don’t know that it’s worth it by itself. There’s a lot to like, but a lot to hate, too. A definite rental only for most people.

The Video

Well, it looks better than VHS, I guess.

Released by MGM in full-screen only, which is so ludicrous I have to wonder who’s even running the company these days, it’s basically a slightly-cleaner print of the VHS transfer. Colors are drab and look washed-out at times, patches of darkness cause the transfer to break up like Ben & J-Lo, and the contrast is too low for most of the movie. Even worse, the added clarity of the DVD format allows you to see the plexiglass clear as day when Chiun “walks on water” to end the movie. It has moments, but not many of them.

The Audio

An equally lazy Dolby Surround 2.0 mix, basically all coming from the center, and pretty quiet throughout with the exception of the music cues (which blast in obnoxiously from time to time) and the explosions (which are again mixed too loud compared to the rest). The least they could have done was mix it into proper 5.1 DD.

The Extras

Well, you get a trailer. And chapter stops. Yup.

The Ratings:

The Film: ***
The Video: ½*
The Audio: **
The Extras: DUD