Jake Speed, 1986.
Directed by Andrew Lane.
Starring Wayne Crawford, Dennis Christopher, Karen Kopins, John Hurt, Donna Pescow, and Leon Ames.
SYNOPSIS:
A woman hires a fictional hero to help find her kidnapped sister.
Post-Indiana Jones, the 1980s suddenly filled up with adventure movies featuring a rough-and-ready hero helping out an attractive young woman (who was usually looking for a lost relative) in some faraway exotic location, and 1986s Jake Speed certainly pays homage to the swashbuckling archaeologist in many ways but falls way short of the mark, even failing to match up to other Jones knock-offs such as Romancing the Stone or King Solomon’s Mines.
The basics are all in place as Margaret Winston (Karen Kopins – Once Bitten) is desperate to find her sister who has been captured by white slave traders. After her senile grandfather announces that there is nobody in the world to help who matches up to the heroes he reads about in books Margaret is approached by Desmond Floyd (Dennis Christopher – It), assistant to pulp novel hero Jake Speed (Wayne Crawford – Diary of a Hitman) who is a fictional character but yet he’s here in the flesh, and together the three travel to war-torn Africa to do battle with the kidnapper, who turns out to be Speed’s old foe Sid (John Hurt – Alien).
And that is all there is to it, literally, but unfortunately this paper-thin plot is stretched out for 104 minutes as Margaret (and the audience) is forced to listen to page upon page of exposition delivered by a lead actor with all the charm and charisma of dry cement. What is worse than what they are saying is how the various actors interact with each other, especially whenever Wayne Crawford speaks to Dennis Christopher, who is usually good in the films he is in but there are split seconds of dead air between the two as if they are waiting for the other one to remember their lines and the whole thing just moves along at a sluggish and frustrating rate. Even the action scenes, reminiscent of The A-Team TV show but not as exciting or staged as well, just sort of hit and play out with little impact or any sense of danger as wave after wave of faceless henchmen are randomly shot or blown up but so what? We are given no reason to care for any of the people on either side, apart from Margaret and by that point she has been reduced to a simpering love interest.
The main problem is Jake Speed doesn’t really have anything outstanding about it and just doesn’t match up to any of the movies it is trying to emulate. The plot, such as it is, has no meat to it and the film just lulls from one scene to the next with very little in the way of energy or momentum. Any sense of mischievous fun it has is provided by John Hurt, who appears far too late in the film for his character to be anything more than a convenient way to bring the meandering narrative to a close. Hurt also appears to be in a different movie from the rest of the cast who, apart from Karen Kopins trying her best against an awful script, seem to be sleepwalking their way to the final credits, which really cannot come soon enough Fans of campy ‘80s action/adventure movies may find some mild joy here due to it not taking itself entirely seriously but the sense of fun that such a style of storytelling should be drowning in is largely missing thanks to stiff acting and lacklustre writing that really wants to be clever, self-referential and, in today’s parlance, meta but it would take a few more years, a bigger budget and more talent for that idea to be given fruition with Arnie’s The Last Action Hero. Jake Speed, for all of its good intentions, just doesn’t do the business on any level, and the sparse amount of special features on the disc – an interview with director Andrew Lane and an interview with producer William Fay are all you get here – and the unspectacular Blu-ray transfer mean there is very little to recommend it other than it being an another addition to your Arrow Video collection.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
