Gymkata (1985)

I know I'm going to step on someone's toes by saying this, but unless the Summer Olympics are in full swing, most Americans don't really care about gymnastics. Gymnasts get a ton of press if they put forth an amazing Olympic performance, and once summer becomes fall, they fade back into obscurity. I mean, do you hear anyone still talking about Nadia Comăneci, Mary Lou Retton, or Kerri Strug anymore?

I bring this up because gymnastics had a hot period in the middle part of the '80s, mostly due to Retton's sudden popularity after the '84 Olympics. That hot period ultimately helped contribute to the 1985 movie Gymkata, a box office bomb that has spent the last twenty-five years in relative obscurity. It does have a small cult following, though, and this review will by my attempt to figure out why.

Gymkata take us to the tiny Middle Eastern country of Parmistan. All foreigners who visit the country must play "The Game," a lethal endurance race and obstacle course that hasn't been won in over 900 years. However, if a competitor can somehow manage to actually win, he will escape with his life and be granted one request. As the movie begins, gymnastics champion Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas) has been recruited to play The Game by the U.S. government. If he wins, his request will be used to install a base in Parmistan as part of America's new missile defense system.

But standing in Cabot's way is Commander Zamir (Richard Norton), a high-ranking military official that secretly plans to overthrow Parmistan's king. Zamir also has the hots for Princess Rubali (Tetchie Agbayani), the king's daughter. But because she's also leading Cabot through Parmistan and assisting with his training, Zamir has developed a rival for her affections. So if Cabot wants to walk away victorious, he'll have to find a way to avoid Zamir's attempts to sabotage The Game and come out victorious.

Until you've actually seen it, you have no idea just how utterly stupid Gymkata is. It is a legitimate contender for the title of "dumbest movie I've ever seen." It's an amazing mishmash of bad ideas slapped together into one ugly car wreck of a movie. The big problem is that it just doesn't seem to know what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a straightforward martial arts movie? Is it a political espionage thriller? Is it just a ripoff of The Most Dangerous Game? You get the impression that Gymkata wants to be all of these things, but it ultimately gets none of them right.

The man in charge is Robert Clouse, who previously directed the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon. How do you go from something awesome like Enter the Dragon to something lame like Gymkata? In any event, Clouse's direction here is pitiful. It's uninteresting and dull, the editing is choppy, and Clouse's decisions when to use slow-motion come at weird, unnecessary times. You'd think he'd never made a movie before.

The other elements of the production are awful too. The prop knives, blades, and swords all look like cheap plastic, and the mediocre music (composed by Alfi Kabiljo) is way too repetitive for its own good. And I'm pretty sure the foley guy was hard of hearing and decided to jack the sound up all the way during the editing, because the sound effects are almost always way too loud. Listening to the movie almost becomes comical, to be truthful about it.

The writing for the movie is also pretty lousy. Written by Charles Robert Carner, the script is full of terrible dialogue and scenes that have no point at all. There's a ten-minute segment near the beginning that contributes nothing to the movie whatsoever, and it probably shouldn't have been written in the first place, let alone filmed and left in the final cut of the movie. And what about that fight scene where our hero uses a conveniently-placed pommel horse to kick the crap out of about two dozen lunatics? Who came up with that?

There's practically no plot, either. All the details you'll need to know are in the first fifteen minutes; everything after that is just there for the sake of being there. It's so anemic that you could barely say that there's any story at all. And I don't quite get why the government needed to send some random guy to play The Game. Instead of getting a Green Beret, a Navy SEAL, or someone with black ops training, they send in an untrained civilian. That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Last on my list is the acting, which is bad all across the board. In the lead role is world champion gymnast Kurt Thomas, who is most certainly not an actor. His lack of acting ability is obvious, as he spends all the scenes that don't involve his athletic prowess looking like a deer in headlights. Thomas is out of his elements, and casting him was as bad a decision as the one to make Gymkata in the first place. It doesn't help anything that he's so scrawny that it's hard to take him seriously as an action star.

But as bad as Thomas is, he's the only member of the cast that makes an impression. Everyone else is so forgettable that Thomas may as well have been the only person in the movie. My primary example for this is Tetchie Agbayani, the movie's designated love interest. From the looks of it, all that was required of her was to stand around and look pretty, because she only three or four lines of dialogue. I'm not even really sure what purpose the character serves, which makes Agbayani's role in the movie pointless.

As our villain du jour, Richard Norton is so bad that every time he pops up, you begin thinking about all the other movies that you could be watching instead of Gymkata. I honestly stopped paying attention to him altogether after a while. That's the worst kind of bad acting, because I couldn't even bother watching him to make fun of him. I just wanted Norton to go away.

Like I said earlier, Gymkata does have something of a following, and its fans appreciate it as an unintentional comedy. Personally, I couldn't really find any sort of amusement in it. Outside of that really weird pommel horse fight scene, there's not much of anything that I could call entertaining. I really hate bad movies like that, too. If I can't mock it, why even bother at all? But that's Gymkata for you. As you've probably guessed by now, my final judgment is one star and a great big thumbs-down. Be warned: Gymkata is so dumb that it will make you feel dumber as well. I know I feel stupider for having seen it.

Final Rating: *