Awfully Good: Gymkata

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

With everything else going on in the world lately, you may have understandably missed news of the passing of Kurt Thomas, Olympic athlete and one-time action star of…

Gymkata (1985)

Director: Robert Clouse
Stars: Kurt Thomas, Tetchie Agbayani, Richard Norton

A gymnast is trained by the CIA in the deadly new martial art of "gymkata" and sent to the totally-not-made-up country of Parmistan, where he will compete in the king's deadly game of cat-and-mouse and use all of his twirling and jumping skills to stay alive.

Some movies fail to live up to their premise, but GYMKATA delivers exactly what its title promises. Unfortunately what it promises is something nobody ever wanted or asked for. To quote the tagline, it’s "the skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate"… and the excitement of neither.

Mick Dundee was right. This was, in fact, a knife.

Amazingly, GYMKATA comes from a pretty impressive pedigree, which includes director Robert Clouse (ENTER THE DRAGON, GAME OF DEATH) and Charles Robert Carner, writer of another Awfully Good classic, the Rutger Hauer-starring BLIND FURY. However, none of their talent or best intentions could keep this silly film from failing upward and becoming a B-movie masterpiece.

I would describe the plot as "Most Dangerous Game with 75% more handsprings." It's truly one of the most ludicrous story ideas, even before you go and shove gymnastic combat in there: The CIA gets wind of a foreign country that has an annual competition known as The Game—a combination outdoor obstacle course and human-hunting chase. This country is called Parmistan, which is not a delicious cheese sandwich, but a magical Pan-Asian land that is only accessible by white water rafting, where everyone speaks flawless English and dresses like they're living at a renaissance fair.

Whoever competes and wins The Game is granted a wish by the king, which the U.S. government (of course) plans to use to install a Star Wars missile defense station in the country that would "help win the Cold War and save millions of lives." Despite the fact that no one has won the game in 900 years (!), the intelligence agency decides that the best man for the job is an Olympic gymnast hopeful who has zero fighting skills. They hire a black cowboy and an Asian guy with a pet falcon to train him and turn his gymnastics prowess in to lethal killing tactics. This takes about a week and then they send him on his way to do what stronger, more capable men have not been able to accomplish for a literal millennia.

I don't know who this man is, but I would follow him to the ends of the Earth.

What makes GYMKATA special is that, ironically, there is absolutely no reason for gymnastics to be in this movie. Every fight scene could’ve been done with traditional martial arts and would have been much less unintentionally hilarious. The title gimmick just feels like a bad pitch meeting gone wrong, where producers thought they were creating something cool and new and just failed miserably. Instead, each cartwheel and twirl the hero does is completely unnecessary. Unless of course the point is to momentarily confuse your opponent, which could explain why all the henchmen in this movie just stop and stare as their opponent does multiple backflips while they stand around waiting to actually fight.

It also amusingly forces the writers to continually write random gymnastics equipment in to the action scenes, lest our hero be absolutely worthless as a fighter. That's why you'll find things like an Olympic-quality pommel horse in the middle of a small village, perfect for scissor kicking dozens of people, or a set of horizontal bars in a random alley way in the middle of a chase scene, so bad guys can literally walk in to his spinning feet of justice. It's so outlandish, that midway through the movie I was seriously wondering how they were going to work in a floor routine.

1985's action stars included Arnold Schwarzenegger in COMMANDO, Mel Gibson in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME, and… this guy.

Kurt Thomas was a great athlete and gets to show off his gymnastic skills throughout the film, but he is most definitely not a fighter who should be headlining his own movie. Especially when it comes to doing precision stunt work, which is an entirely different skill. I lost count of the number of times Thomas completely misses someone he is supposed to be punching or kicking. Sometimes he's off by feet not inches, suggesting that the wake created by his endless somersaults is enough to knock down bad guys who are nowhere close to him.

The filmmakers also desperately try everything they can to make Thomas look cool, but it just never happens with all the silly things he's forced to do. It's also clear he's not a trained actor the way he unconvincingly delivers his lines or lacks the needed charisma for a character who is supposed to be a suave super spy. Credit where credit's due though—Thomas rocks the hell out of that mullet and he may be the only action star with the balls to pull off multiple action sequences while wearing a very sensible sweater.

The rest of the cast is not particularly memorable, aside from the unending supply of weird extras and bit players the production hired while on location, clearly the best that Yugoslavia had to offer. You could watch this movie all the way through solely looking out for all the bizarre background characters and the horrible dubbing.

Phil really sucked at hide-and-go-seek.

A lot of GYMKATA is standard fare when it comes to bad 80s action movies, but there are plenty of… um, unique moments throughout to keep you entertained. Oftentimes it's little things like male nudity that comes out of nowhere, background flag men who clearly hate their job, and an alarming number of people who keep falling off the same cliff. But sometimes it's more prominent scenes like a guy who chops his hand off for no reason after a fight, a romantic relationship where one half is continually held at knifepoint by the other, or an extended sequence where the hero finds himself stranded in a town full of abandoned "crazies" and has to fight a bunch of people with severe mental health disorders, including women and the elderly.

You can't tell me the filmmakers didn't themselves realize that some of these things were bad ideas or, at the very least, more funny than exciting.

“Hey, I didn’t know you were Jewish!”

Speaking of bad ideas, the movie's final act is full of them. There's the completely unnecessary reveal that Thomas' long-thought-dead father has actually been alive the whole time and working as one of the game's flag bearers, guys who literally just stand around and point contestants in the right direction. And then as soon as he starts to tell his newly reunited son how he managed to stay alive all those years…he's immediately shot with an arrow.

Then there's the final showdown between the villain, a jacked warrior who trained his whole life and commands his own army, and the hero, a scrawny gymnast who took karate lessons the week before. (I'll let you guess who wins…)

And who could forget GYMKATA's final frame, an ending tag that gives a post-movie update as if this was based on a true story. And its clear no one even bothered to proofread it, with it's weird capitalization, extra spaces between words, and lack of commas and periods. It's the absurd cherry on top a deliciously awful sundae.

No one asked for this, Movie.