Disc Reviews

Remo Williams Blu-ray Review

• 9th Jul 2014

The 1980s was a decade of the violent action hero. But these were less James Bond or Dirty Harry and more like your jingoistic über-buff, spend their time down the gym kind of heroes: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis (at least his Die Hard John MaClane was flawed) and on the lower end of the budget: Jean-Paul Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff. Whichever end of the spectrum they came from there was always lots of pyrotechnics and of course a huge body count. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) was yet another of that type of action film – or on the surface at any rate (it was called Remo Williams: Unarmed and Dangerous on its original release in the UK). Based off ‘The Destroyer’ novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, this was intended to be the first of a franchise on its release this was never realised.

The story opens with a New York cop (Fred Ward) who is set upon by a bunch of Brooklyn yobs but is saved from certain death by the CIA. The CIA make out that the cop was killed and put him into a secret hitman training programme. He is given the name Remo Williams and trained by a martial-arts expert Zen Buddhist Korean master (Joel Grey) on how to dodge bullets (literally), use the power of the hands and mind and find inner calm. Needless to say, the master is exasperated by the western white man ways of his pupil (not too dissimilar from David Carradine’s incarnation of Kung-Fu). After getting into a series of scrapes accompanied by the usual action montage sequence played out to the semi-jokey self-parodying soundtrack by Craig Safan, Williams soon finds why his training was so important when he uncovers a plot by nefarious government officials to sell secret US weapons and finds himself with a female officer trying to stop the villains at risk of life and limb.

Remo was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek comical film but this doesn’t always pull off and for the most part is unsuccessful. As a result confused audiences wrote it off as a bad film (much in the way many had done with Big Trouble in Little China (1986)), explaining why box-office results were poor and there were no sequels. Ward also makes for an unlikely hero; great character actor but it is arguable that he is a not a strong candidate for the 80s action hero unlike the aforementioned names at the beginning of the review. Still there are some good keynote scenes in this film such as the fight on the Statue of Liberty and Remo hanging off a Coney Island ferris wheel as a part of his training; Ward claimed that much of the stunt work he did himself.

Another part of the film that did cause controversy was middle aged white guy, Joel Grey playing the Korean sage – although it has to be said he has done a great job in accent, mannerism and make-up and is utterly convincing and arguably the best aspect of the film; on one of the extras Grey talks at great length about this. It is a little overlong at 2 hours, but as would be expected from Arrow there are extras a-plentiful in their usual effort to take a forgotten or cult film and give it some status. Other extras on the film include the well put together hour long documentary charting the story of the action hero in the 1980s as well as other interviews with the composer Craig Safan, Grey’s make-up process and a booklet on the film as well as the usual reversible sleeve.

Chris Hick