I started today off with Gymkata (1985) because I couldn’t get the subtitles to work on my copy of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and the dubbed version doesn’t translate the on-screen text.

Gymkata tells the story of Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas), an Olympic gymnast who is recruited by the US government for a top secret mission to the secluded country of Parmistan (lol), where a dangerous game (basically just an obstacle course) is held and the winner entitled to a single wish. The government wants Cabot to exchange his wish for permission to install a Star Wars surveillance satellite over the country, because this movie is a true product of the mid 80s. The feds sweeten the deal by telling Cabot that his father was a secret spy who was sent in to attempt the Game himself.

This movie straight up does not have a first act. There is a brief prologue where we see Cabot’s father attempt to win the Game, intercut with shots of the younger Cabot at the Olympics, and then Jonathan is thrust into a training montage that also lets him speedrun the romantic subplot of the movie (with his conveniently mute-by-choice love interest, so we can skip all the unnecessary dialogue). Then he’s off to Parmistan and a series of very silly fight scenes where he gets to do gymnastics to people with the aid of conveniently placed parallel bars and pommel horses among the anachronistic 19th century streets of the city.

Princess Rubali (Tetchie Agbayani) and her father The Khan (Buck Kartalian) are fun most of the time, and they have good chemistry with one another. The Khan in particular comes off as a pretty good king, if a little naive. His villainous vizier Zamir (Richard Norton) is suitably musclebound and nefarious. Kurt Thomas was apparently a real Olympic athlete. He won a bunch of World Championship medals, but never medalled at the Olympics themselves. I know absolutely nothing about gymnastics, but I guess he seemed like he was good at it. It does not make for a convincing fighting style, however.

The plot of this movie is silly, but fine, and the stunts are well done (if silly as well a lot of the time) but the technical aspects of this film are seriously lacking. There is a tremendous reliance on slow-motion and scenes that refuse to end just to make it to a 90 minute runtime. You could edit this thing down to a lean 45 minute TV special and not really lose anything in the process. The music also frequently does not match the tone of the action on screen, and it sometimes feels like they just didn’t have anything that fit, so they reused other parts of the score. In that same vein, the ADR made necessary by the slow-motion sequences is not done well, which wouldn’t be a big problem if those scenes were not so incredibly long.

Overall I feel this is a 3/5. It could have been tightened up and been more watchable, but not without bringing it below feature length. There’s just not much movie here.