You can purchase GYMKATA here.
The Action/Adventure Section — A weekly column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
In my wildest imagination, I never could have chosen a more perfect movie to kick off this dream column of mine. Action movies are my social dysfunction. I would say they are my guilty pleasure except I feel no guilt whatsoever. I want to watch, talk about, and write about action movies FAR more than society as a whole will allow me to. So this column will, I hope, be an outlet for me to seek out new obscurities, revisit classic titles from my youth, and generally provide some sort of anchor to sane and rational society so that I don’t get wholly swallowed by sweaty biceps and feathered mullets. I hope to turn readers on to titles as I go, and also dialog with action fans about the titles I unearth.
So today I actually went to Vulcan Video here in Austin to put my hands on the perfect film for The Action/Adventure Section’s maiden voyage. It had to be something I had never seen, but always wanted to. It couldn’t be TOO obscure, but also couldn’t be too obvious. As my eyes fell upon GYMKATA, it was as if I had found the golden ticket.
Then I put the movie in. Glorious, mulleted, slow-motion gymnastics met my eyes. Those images are intercut with a man being run down by horse-mounted riders. Who are these people? How are these two sequences related? What the hell is Gymkata? Is that even a word? I couldn’t wipe the smile off of my face for all of Act I of this fantastic slice of obscura.
Clearly intended as a star vehicle for American gymnast Kurt Thomas, GYMKATA hypes up this real-life gymnast as a deadly fighter who has combined his world-class gymnastics training with karate to become the world’s most complete fighter. Before 5 minutes of this movie has passed, and without even remotely enough set up to make it convincing, some type of agent for the US is recruiting Thomas’ character, Jonathan Cabot, to infiltrate a fake country in the east somewhere off the Caspian Sea in order to something something Cold War something something. There is a training montage, a love connection with the fake country’s princess, and then we are off to the tournament!
Wait, did I say tournament? Because that would be too cliché, wouldn’t it? Another martial arts movie about a Westerner infiltrating and becoming the first foreigner to win? (Well, to be fair, I would watch endless versions of that movie, and have already proven so by my lifestyle.) But no, GYMKATA is no mere tournament film. After some gun fights featuring a deep-seated disregard for human life happen, Jonathan arrives in Fake Country in order to play “The Game.” This game involves world class athletes traversing a massive, natural terrain obstacle course while being hunted to the death. The only way to win is to survive.
Why did I fall so deeply in love with this movie? Well, to kick things off, Kurt Thomas is pretty well-utilized here. And by that I don’t mean he was a good actor or had any number of other traits that leading men typically do. No, Kurt Thomas has none of those things. And he never had another starring role after this one. What the dude DOES bring to the table is gymnastics. And he’s going to do some pretty spectacular things with his body. If you could stick a gymnast in an action film, what would you have them do? Decimate a gang of pursuers by face-kicking them from a parallel bar? Check. A training montage that involves our hero walking up a staircase with his hands? GYMKATA’s got that. A pommel horse action scene? Yeah. What, you had never even DREAMED that a pommel horse fight scene might exist? I hadn’t dreamed that either, but I didn’t know how empty my life had been until I saw it.
And it is no mistake that GYMKATA is such a gleeful slice of fun. This thing is directed by none other than Robert “ENTER THE DRAGON” Clouse. Looking over his IMDB page, I can virtually guarantee you that several other Clouse titles will be gracing the Action/Adventure Section in the coming years. (He also did BLACK BELT JONES, THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR, and THE BIG BRAWL! None of which I have seen, and all of which I desperately want to.) Clouse is no fool. He knows exactly what he is making and he wastes no time delivering the goods.
If I have any complaints, they would be that the film features very few actual gyms. I envisioned a movie actually set in the world of gymnastics. But Clouse’ intention is to whisk us away to the magic East, where New Yorkers with comb overs can play a Khan, and princesses are exotic just because they are half Asian. He wastes very little time, but the film goes to places of wackiness I would never have imagined from the box art. I was a little disoriented by how little “gym”ing or “kata”ing was happening in Act II of the movie, but eventually “The Game” takes us through such a fun house of weirdness that the film becomes even more than I originally hoped for. It becomes a lean, mean, surreal ride.
And when I say mean, I am not really joking. Again, if I had to guess based on the cover art of GYMKATA, I’d guess we’d have a gimmicky action set up involving a heroic athlete who somehow thwarts the bad guys using his gymnastics skills. But no, this dude is presented as an ultimate warrior of some kind. His gymnastics make him an unstoppable force and all, but this guy will absolutely grab the nearest AK and fill you with lead. Hands will be chopped off, arrows will piece lungs, and literally dozens of people will be murdered before it is all through. GYMKATA would never be greenlit today. I could see Hollywood casting a gymnast as a hero in a feature film today, but I guarantee it wouldn’t be an R-rated romp on the level that GYMKATA is aiming for.
I won’t even get into the amazing subplot with the lead characters father rocking a heavy deus ex machina complex, or the impracticality of the particular brand of martial arts on display here, or the apparent loss of financing that seems to have brought on one of the more abrupt endings I can recall seeing in quite some time. You’ll have to discover all those things on your own. But I encourage any action fan to do so. While GYMKATA goes in fascinatingly obscure and surreal directions, it never fails to entertain. And there really isn’t anything else like it out there. Of course, by that I mean that there are literally hundreds of movies just like it out there. But none of them QUITE have this unique of a spin, or this agile of a leading man. GYMKATA is 90 minutes of slow motion-fueled, martial-arts mayhem that will put a smile on even the hardest-hearted actionites out there.
HOW CAN YOU SEE GYMKATA?
I rented the DVD from a local video store, but GYMKATA can be rented on Netflix as a disc or purchased on Amazon. Sadly, there isn’t a Blu-ray release of GYMKATA yet, but a man can dream.
And I’m Out.