On My Shelf: Gymkata (1985)... It's Everything You Heard It Was, And More.

I'd heard many pop-culture references to the movie Gymkata before, but had never seen it. A couple years back I randomly bought Mr. Hall a copy, and since I was doing everything a few weeks ago avoid watching the copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth that I got from the library, I thought we better watch Gymkata.



Let me start by saying this. Gymkata is a bad movie. A very bad movie. The story is bad, the casting is bad, and the acting is bad. And yet, I'm still going to recommend that you watch it, and here's why.

The set-up: The country of Parmistan (somewhere in Eastern Europe?) has a weird national death game, where -- if you compete in it, and avoid dying -- you are allowed to make one request of the King which will immediately be honored. (The US government is interested in this because Parmistan is a highly strategic place to put a missile, and if one of our own competes and wins, he can have the missile put there before Russia does the exact same thing.) They decide to recruit Olympic Gymnast Jonathan Cabot (real-life Olympic Gymnast Kurt Thomas) to compete in the game. (I guess they assume, because he's a gymnast, he will be good at running and jumping and avoiding arrows.)
Poor Kurt Thomas. He just didn't quite have an air of
"leading man" about him.Johnathan Cabot is recruited because his father competed in the game (and failed) -- and the US attempts to avoid a similar fate for Jonathan by hiring ninjas and a couple other random folks (who are never introduced at all) to train him. This part of the movie moves along really fast (and is very confusing) because they cut out all the stuff you generally put at the beginning of a movie -- like introductions for these multiple characters and character development for our leads. So, the beginning it's kind of a "This is Jonathan Cabot! Now he is training! Now he is done training! Now he and this girl he just met are in love! Now he is going to Parmistan to compete in The Game!"

And that's kind of how the movie goes on. There are quite a few spots where new characters just kind of appear, without any establishing shot or introduction whatsoever -- or, when they are given an introduction, any follow-up dialogue that might tell you about their character is pretty much completely edited out of the film. There's a point later on in the movie where we suddenly cut to our heroes clustered around a table, listening to some random guy (whose face we can't even see) explain the "game" route... And then this guy puts on a hat with a jewel and walks out of the room and we (the audience) suddenly realize that this was the King (i.e. a highly significant character) -- and we were never even TOLD that in his introductory scene!

Let's talk a little about the casting, while we're on that. Poor Kurt Thomas -- he was definitely very athletic, and very good at gymnastics... but he just doesn't have the charisma to make this kind of a movie work. Nor are his line reads anything to write home about. The King is played by character actor and former body-builder, Buck Kartalian. Buck Kartalian was described by Cinematic Titanic as, "From the neck downward, Charles Atlas. From the neck upward, Mel Brooks." And he sounds about as Eastern-European as your average guy who grew up in New York in the 1930's -- in other words, he also sounds like Mel Brooks.)

"It's good to be the King!"And King Mel Brooks' daughter is played by this Asian lady:


... And, besides anything else, I think this is genetically impossible.

So, the casting is questionable, to say the least.

Getting back to the plot, "Jonathan Cabot" goes to Parmistan and is attacked by random thugs, who he fights off with gymnastics moves.

Yes, he conveniently finds gymnastics equipment in this 3rd world,
Eastern European country that he can use to execute "gymkata" with. At this point, it gets a bit weird, as "The Game" includes having to survive a run through a "cannibal city" amongst other things -- and that's where the movie gets hypnotically weird. It's positively surreal at that point...


So, never mind the fact that this movie pretty much avoids establishing characters, or pausing for expository dialogue, or explaining really any background on almost anything.

Never mind the fact that the whole concept of a hero whose main thing is combining karate and gymnastics is ridiculous. Never mind that the whole concept of "The Game" is pretty poorly thought out and confusingly explained.

But the film also gets bat-poo crazy about two-thirds of the way in. It just makes no sense. And then, some other very abrupt and random stuff happens, and the movie very abruptly ends.

After watching this, Mr. Hall did some research and discovered that this was based on a 1950's novel called "The Terrible Game" -- which had nothing to do with gymnastics. Therefore, I'm guessing, some movie producer saw Kurt Thomas during the 1984 Olympics and thought, "This gymnastics stuff seems really popular... I bet could make a million dollars off it!" and hastily hired Kurt Thomas to make a movie. However, they didn't spend the time to write and develop a gymnastics movie for him that made sense -- no, they looked through old scripts they had optioned, and hastily threw gymnastics into the first one that seemed to have some action elements.



So what is my final say on this movie?

YOU SHOULD WATCH IT.

Although the casting, acting, and story are terrible -- this movie is full of hilarious action, unexpected plot twists, and it moves along really speedily (since it doesn't pause for sensible dialogue or character development). Not to mention, right after we watched it, I realized that I'd been missing out dozens of weird pop-culture references to this movie!

This is a perfect "watch with a group of friends to make fun of" type of movie. It was hilarious to watch, and a lot of fun. Definitely a keeper.

RECOMMENDED!Good Bad Movie