Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins

Remo Williams is a slam-bang action-adventure loaded with surprises. Just when you think it's going to be just another bone-cruncher steeped in patriotic paranoia, it sends itself up hilariously. Remo Williams has some of the funniest, brightest dialogue heard on screen all year. Read full review

Despite its rather arrogant title for a first film, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, a series could lurk inside this drawnout, but often spectacular and funny adventure film. Read full review

An above-average thriller, offering a fresh hero based on "The Destroyer" series of novels (at least 120 of which are currently available). Read full review

You can get carried along by the exuberance and likability of Remo: The Adventure Begins , only to have the despair of the pop mythology underneath it catch up with you the morning after. Read full review

Though directed by Guy Hamilton, who has made four Bond films, Remo Williams is lackluster of pace and quite clumsy in the telling. And though no one demands devotion to verisimilitude in this kind of thing, a plot this ridden with holes is not an auspicious beginning. It seems unlikely that an audience that already has Rocky and Rambo needs a Remo. [11 Oct 1985, p.D1]

The film [based on The Destroyer series by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy] never seems to know where it's going and, when the smoke has cleared, doesn't seem to have got there either. Read full review

That’s not to say that it’s a complete wash-out. The film comes to vivid life during Remo’s ridiculous yet hugely entertaining training sequences, and there are flashes of inventiveness and personality elsewhere. It’s just a shame that more often than not, the film feels like a stunt performance showreel – complete with distracting pre-CG concealing wire work – with not enough investment in character or pacing. Read full review

Dodgy business magnate Cioffi is up to no good in the armaments world, but even he can't ship an extra consignment of charisma to a picture that suffers from able character performer Ward's lack of leading-man presence or physique. Read full review

Seditious themes aside, the adventure fails mostly because Ward never achieves super- hero status. He never quite lives up to the name RE-MO. Sluggo maybe. Read full review

The most elementary requirement of an action movie is that the hero know the score, be in command -- it lends tension to the moments when he's not in command -- a requirement that screen writer Christopher Wood blithely neglects. Aw, forget it -- just tell me when it ends. Read full review

Another elaborately produced, brutal, all-too-jocular adventure film, which cost so much money that it's difficult to take it as lightly as it means to be taken. There's something deeply unpleasant about seeing this many millions of dollars being spent to such paltry purpose. Read full review

Ward, a gruff, amiable presence, has the stuff of an appealing blue-collar hero, but he hasn't got a chance with the feeble setup the filmmakers have given him: he's made the butt of meathead jokes for 60 minutes (as he tries to cope with the rigors of Chiun's training) and then plopped down in the middle of a slipshod intrigue, where his success has more to do with luck than any of the skills he has supposedly mastered. Read full review