I’ve always loved action movies, and over time I’ve developed an unusually high tolerance for cheesy dialogue and plot holes. Honestly, though, I’ve got no one but myself to blame for watching this film. I should’ve known full well what I was getting into the first time I saw “Gymkata” — even the VHS cassette looked lame, sitting there all sad and lonely on the shelf of my hometown Adopt-a-Video store, looking dusty and untouched and pathetic. The tagline said it all: “A new kind of martial arts combat! The skill of gymnastics, with the kill of karate.” And as for the starring role? Stallone or Schwarzenegger must have been tied up on other projects, so a gymnast named Kurt Thomas scored top billing.
As far as the story, well, it was just about as bad as any I’ve ever seen. Kurt Thomas played the role of Jonathan Cabot, a world-class gymnast recruited by the “Special Intelligence Agency” to serve as some kind of secret agent. His mission? To infiltrate the remote Central Asian nation of “Parmistan,” and convince their government to install a secret satellite monitoring system on behalf of the United States. Sounds easy, right? Just your everyday, Cold War-style junket? Well, here’s the catch: the ruling regime in Parmistan, for some unexplained reason, apparently requires all foreign petitioners to first take part in “The Game”, which is basically an endurance race with life-or-death combat situations mixed in for good measure. And just in case Cabot was having any second thoughts about his patriotism, the kid also learns that his own father was actually a secret SIA agent, who went missing in Parmistan after attempting to take on “The Game” himself.
Still with me? Well, I don’t want to give away many spoilers, although I will say that the best way to spoil this movie would be by wasting two hours of your life watching it. Of course Jonathan Cabot accepts the mission, and yes, there are a ton of cheesy martial arts training scenes which follow. Throw in an exotic foreign princess, the obligatory mystical guru, and the cast of stereotypical characters is pretty much complete. His training over, Cabot heads off to Parmistan and… yeah, “Gymkata” is all downhill from there.
Oddly enough, this movie ended up enjoying its own unique kind of success, if only because it was so bad. “Gymkata” seems to have earned a permanent ranking on every “Worst Movies” list, and it’s now considered something of a cult classic. And even though it appears that Kurt Thomas is much better suited for gymnastics than for acting, we shouldn’t be too hard on the guy. At the peak of his career, Thomas was the clear favorite to take home an Olympic gold medal, but he missed his best chance when the USA boycotted the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. Thomas instead pursued a number of endorsement opportunities, effectively trading in his “amateur athlete” status and giving up his chance to compete in the 1984 Games. Today, despite his amazing athletic record, his success as a gymnastics instructor, and his track record as a business owner, most cinephiles still only see Kurt Thomas as a skinny kid with a bad mullet and too-tight shorts who used his martial arts prowess to shift the global balance of power at the height of the Cold War. But you know what? I bet he’s probably okay with that…