Film Friday: Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)

Directed by James Bond director Guy Hamilton, Remo Williams was meant to kick start a James Bond-like franchise about an American assassin. It didn’t. The film bombed at the box office. But it has since become a cult classic which still gets television play almost thirty years after it was released. I enjoy this film a lot, but I also know why it went wrong.

** spoiler alert **

Remo Williams stars Fred Ward as a New York City cop who gets drafted by a mysterious organization called CURE. CURE is only three people, Wilford Brimley, J.S. Preston and Ward, and they answer directly to the President. Their mission is to target untouchable high-level criminals who walk the halls of power within the nation’s capitol by killing them in what appear to be accidents. As Preston puts it, they are enforcing the Eleventh Commandment: “thou shalt not get away with it.”

As the story begins, Ward is “recruited” by Preston. This entails putting Ward into a coma, taking him to the hospital where he undergoes plastic surgery, reporting him dead, and giving a new name -- Remo Williams. Ward is then taken to meet Chuin, a Korean martial arts master of the (non-existent) art of Sinanju. Chuin begins Remo’s training. Meanwhile, the film introduces George Grove, the villain. He owns Grove Industries, a defense contractor which is selling defective equipment to the military, including an SDI/Star Wars defense prototype which doesn’t really exist. Grove is being pursued by the tenacious Major Fleming (Kate Mulgrew of Star Trek Voyager), who is an auditor with serious doubts about Grove Industries.

These characters soon collide in a series of incidents.

Why This Movie Deserves To Be Remembered

There are several reasons this movie deserves its cult classic status. For one thing, it’s just a fun movie. This is partially because the actors are all very likeable and partially because the film never takes itself too seriously. Indeed, in many ways, this film is exactly like other quasi-comedic actions films of the period like Buckaroo Banzai and Tremors. Thus, you get lighthearted action and lots of little jokes throughout the film, like how Preston names Remo after a bedpan, a masterfully well-done scene where Remo gets chased by overly-talented dogs, and an hilarious bit of flirting between Remo and Fleming: “nice buttons.”

Secondly, the character of Chuin is worth the price of admission alone. Played by Joel Grey (Cabaret), Chuin is an ancient martial arts master who loves soap operas, is fiercely anti-anything that isn’t Korean, and just barrages Remo with obscure and hilarious insults. His take on American life is both biting and yet also extremely funny: “they call it fast food because it speeds you to your grave.” He also displays near magical powers, such as being able to dodge bullets, which make all the training scenes extremely entertaining. Chuin also provides the movie with heart. For while he has little respect for Remo initially, he slowly grows to love him like a son, which adds a few nice emotional moments to the film.

Why This Movie Failed

Despite the above, it is undeniable that Remo Williams ultimately fails as a movie because it lacks a strong punch. The characters are solid and you care about them and the crime is inventive and despicable, but somehow none of it feels consequential. Moreover, while Remo does a lot of exciting things, the film never sustains a sense of excitement. Why? Well, because the story has been assembled in the wrong order.

One of the most important rules of writing is to build to a climax. Hence, the conflicts within the story should build one on top of the next until you come to the point of resolution, which is the climax. Remo Williams doesn’t do this. To the contrary, it delivers its climax in the middle of the film and does so without connecting the various story threads.

The real crime at issue in Remo Williams is the fake SDI program (the HARP). That is what Fleming is investigating. That is what CURE is investigating. That is what Grove is paying generals to cover up. So resolving the HARP issue should be the film’s climax. Indeed, it should be the focal point where Fleming’s story and Remo’s story come together as they meet in a final match against Grove. But it’s not. The HARP issue gets suddenly resolved halfway through the film when Remo and Preston raid Grove’s warehouse and the HARP blows itself up, covering up the crime. At that point, the film shifts. Fleming now pursues Grove over some defective rifles Grove has sold the Army -- a minor subplot which was barely mentioned in the first half of the film. CURE declares its mission over. And Remo decides to seek revenge against Grove all on his own. This will now be where the story resolves itself.

But this is problematic. For one thing, this means that everything CURE and Fleming have done up to this point is now meaningless. This is particularly problematic with regard to Fleming because her story has yet to mesh with Remo’s. And since Remo knows nothing about the rifles and doesn’t care, those two stories can’t really mesh, as seen when the film tries to combine their missions to achieve a climax. Since they have no common goals, they have little use for each other. Thus, Remo just makes sure she is safe and then continues his mission without her, turning her story into simple filler. This wastes her entire character.

Moreover, the HARP mission had the bang to be a climax, but the rifle mission doesn’t. The HARP mission involved breaking into a secure warehouse, guarded by unknown forces and highly trained dogs, and it ended in a huge explosion. This is exactly the type of action which starts or ends all action films. The rifle investigation, by comparison, is small potatoes. It involves a chase through the woods with limited players and limited effects. There are some dangerous stunts, but they aren’t visually spectacular. The sense of danger also is rather low because this isn’t Grove’s home turf, so he doesn’t control the challenges Remo faces and Grove himself is no match for Remo. Thus, making this the ending was a poor choice all around.

What Remo Williams should have done was swap out these two moments. The rifle investigation should have come first and led to the HARP investigation, with Remo and Fleming drawing closer and closer as the stakes went up as they get nearer to the resolution of the HARP project. This would have allowed everything the film did to build on itself and would have allowed Remo and Fleming to develop their chemistry. How much stronger would this have made the film? I would think a lot stronger. In fact, in hindsight, this is so obvious that I wonder why they didn’t see this? The screenwriter, Christopher Wood, claims he wrote a more climactic scene which was discarded for budgetary reasons, but even if that is true, it still doesn’t explain the strange choice to essentially start the story over midway through? This tells me, we are probably looking at writer-failure.

All in all, it’s too bad this wasn’t fixed because so much else about this film resonates so well.