Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)

Directed by Guy Hamilton. Starring Fred Ward, Joel Grey, Wilford Brimley, J. A. Preston, Kate Mulgrew, George Coe, Charles Cioffi, Michael Pataki, Patrick Kilpatrick. [PG-13]

Fantastically fun action/adventure bang-up in the skillful secret agent and political paranoia traditions, based on a series of pulp novels from Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (“The Destroyer”). Ward is a hardened street cop who’s recruited against his will to become an assassin for a secret government agency called CURE, which adheres to the 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not get away with it”; his handler: a pint-sized Korean master of the martial art known as “Sinanju” (played by Grey in an example of problematic casting that would not fly today, but he’s so perfect in the role that he even nabbed a Golden Globe nomination!). The momentum sometimes shifts too jarringly, the last act is a bit of an anti-climax, and there’s a hole where a great antagonist should be, but the movie is so darn entertaining that it’s hard to complain. Oodles of sensational stuntwork (many of them performed by Ward himself), terrific set pieces filmed at Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel and the Statue of Liberty mid-renovation, and best of all, a sense of humor that allows the story to function as both a slam-bang thriller and a hilarious send-up of itself—the scene with the acrobatic guard dogs is alone worth the price of admission. Tremendously rousing music by Craig Safan. Intended to be the start of a franchise (hence the subtitle), but its high budget and middling box office quashed that potential—too bad. One of the executive producers was Dick Clark.

82/100