Remo Williams: the Adventure Goes Nowhere

Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins was, apparently, supposed to have a sequel or two – The Adventure Continues, perhaps. Well, there's a clear reason why this adventure did not continue. Remo Williams is dumb. Now, dumb is of course, fine, but this film spends the majority of its time on the elite assassin Remo Williams training for doing the things he's going to do instead of doing them. I swear to you that this training takes up some 75 minutes of the 120-minute film, maybe even more. It's so boring. This is the kind of thing most filmmakers would make into a montage sequence. There's just no reason to watch this adult man train to be a fighter for this long – especially since the martial art he's allegedly learning is totally fictional.

There is another very large problem. The person training Remo is a wise old Korean sensei named Chiun who is played by Joel Grey. It's 1985. Joel Grey as Asian martial artist? Really? Worse yet, this film was nominated for an Academy Award in one category: Makeup. The yellowface makeup in this movie was deemed so extraordinary that it deserved an Oscar nomination.

Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins was directed by Guy Hamilton, who directed a few excellent James Bond films in the '60s and '70s (Goldfinger and Live and Let Die), and one can see how this film is of a piece with that stuff, but this one falls flat. I usually like 1980s sci-fi stuff, although this turned out to be more of an adventure film than science fiction, but Remo Williams was junk.