Gymkata (1985) – Review

The blending of gymnastics and martial arts for an action movie certainly seems like a natural idea, Jackie Chan practically made a career out of it, but in 1985 director Robert Clouse adapted a short story by Dan Tyler Moore called “The Terrible Game” and the result was a terrible movie. But how can such a simple concept fail so badly?

What if the stability of the world’s stage rested in the hands of a gymnast? That is the basic premise of Robert Clouse’s Gymkata, a film that doesn’t so much have a plot as it does a series of contrived action scenes thrown together to show off the skills of Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas. The story deals with gymnastic superstar Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas) being asked by Special Agent Paley (Edward Michael Bell) to help the Special Intelligence Agency (SIA) in their attempts at getting permission to install a US satellite monitoring station in the country of Parmistan, a tiny mountain nation which is supposedly located in the Hindu Kush mountain range, but the only way to get this permission is for someone to enter The Game and win an athletic competition that no foreigner has one in 900-years.  Unfortunately, there is no second prize as failure means death, so to give him the edge he needs to win over the beautiful Parmistan Princess Rubali (Tetchie Agbayani), who is an expert on all aspects of The Game and has been engaged to train him.

“Exactly what kind of training are we talking about here?”

After a training period, where Rubali’s “training” is enhanced by martial arts teacher (Sonny Barnes) and a Japanese guru (Tadashi Yamashita), and when he is deemed ready he and the Princess are sent to the town of Karabal on the Caspian Sea, for their infiltration into Parmistan. What follows is a series of wacky adventures, consisting of Cabot and Rubali being betrayed by one of their own – a creepy handler destined to get machine gunned down – the Princess is kidnapped and it’s up to Cabot to stage a one-man-rescue via his amazing combination of gymnastic technique and martial arts skill – much of this depends on Cabot coming across high bars and a pommel horse which crops up when needed – but the real threat comes in the form of Commander Zamir (Richard Norton) who is the King’s right-hand man and manager of The Game, but he is actually planning a coup against the King and will attempt to sell the satellite rights to enemies of America, worst of all, he also intends to marry Princess Rubali.

They do make a lovely couple.

Stray Observation:

• The opening credit sequence features Kurt Thomas performing a gymnastic routine in what looks like a black void, while ominous music plays.  Clearly, this was to show us just how dangerous gymnastics truly are.
• We are told that The Game is never the same which makes Princess Rubali’s claim to be an expert dubious at best, and all her “training” seems to consist of pulling a knife on Cabot and sucking face.
• A good portion of Cabot’s training focuses on his ability to walk up stairs on his hands, giving us an unfortunate view of his crotch, strangely enough, this skill is never paid off later in the movie.
• While Kurt Thomas never won an Olympic medal he did win a Razzie for this movie and that’s an achievement many athletes can’t claim.
• I like to think that the “Star Wars” defensive initiative, proposed by President Ronald Reagan, failed to get off the ground due to the release and bad reception of this movie.
• The ‘town of crazies’ our hero must fight through were actually crazy people from a local insane asylum in Yugoslavia, who were provided with alcohol and a buffet for their time. I’m not sure if that is genius casting or absolutely appalling and exploitative, but who knows, maybe it was a really good buffet.

Lucky for Cabot, the town’s square had a perfectly functional pommel horse.

To put it bluntly, as an actor Kurt Thomas is a great gymnast, he is just so bland and terrible in practically every scene of this movie that it’s hard to watch at times.  Though to be fair, the selling point of this movie was the showcasing of Kurt Thomas’s abilities as a gymnast and not his thespian skills, unfortunately, while these action sequences were supposed to be the highlight of the film they were poorly choreographed and lacked any real sense of excitement or tension, which is a death knell to an action movie. The gymnastics and martial arts blend utilized by Thomas in this movie seemed to be more of a gimmick than a well-thought-out concept and they become more laughable as the film goes on.

Special shout out to this film’s winner of the Mel Brooks look-a-like contest.

In conclusion, Gymkata is only noteworthy for how truly bad it is, it is an action adventure film that failed to deliver on its promises of either action or adventure.  But as an unintentional comedy?  Well, in that area it certainly has its merits and over the years it has developed quite the cult following – not that this helped springboard any kind of acting career for Mister Thomas – and so Gymkata will most likely remain a favourite of bad movie lovers everywhere, and there are certainly worse fates for a film than that.  Many other bad films have fallen into oblivion while this entry will forever live on for all those who love cheap productions, terrible acting and ludicrously cheesy scripts.