The flu continues, slightly better but still miserable. Sounds are distorted, vision is wobbly, disorientation is business as usual. I haven't felt this horrible since 1985--the first time I saw Gymkata.
Wow. It's hard to believe it's taken so long for this thing to arrive on DVD. There have been some profoundly bad ideas for movies--casting Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees as ersatz Beatles in Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, for instance, or Chesty Morgan as Double Agent 73--but there's never been anything as stupefying as this. I remember when my Mom first saw a trailer for this thing--"The thrill of gymnastics! The kill of karate!"--she insisted we had to see it. Mom was up for any bad movie challenge, and this was no ordinary challenge. This was...Gymkata.
Whisper thin Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas plays an athlete inexplicably picked by the government to infiltrate a mysterious contest in the mythical Eurotrash nation of Parmistan. But first, his natural abilities for flipping and tumbling must be enhanced by training from a Yoda-like master, who will instruct him in the ways of Eastern martial arts ("The kill of karate!") and spout bad aphorisms by the truckload. Training complete, Thomas still pretty much just flips and tumbles, what with Parmistan having parallel bars and hobbyhorses conveniently located whenever an action scene is necessary.
With a premise like that, you'd be forgiven for thinking Gymkata must have been intended as a joke, or at least was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Sadly, no--it's annoyingly earnest, from its right-wing Reagan-era politics (the U.S. is interested in Parmistan as a site on which to build a Star Wars missile defense system) to its out of nowhere romantic clinches. Director Robert Clouse cut his teeth on seventies martial arts films like Enter The Dragon and Black Belt Jones, which were themselves remarkably stupid, but which at least had kick-ass action scenes. Here, you just get a tiny guy with goofy hair doing backflips.
And what was Mom's verdict when she saw Gymkata? "It wasn't as good as I'd hoped for. It wasn't even entertaining. It was just stupid."
