Nom de code: Jaguar

"Jaguar Lives" is very slow and plodding entertainment, despite a tip-top cast being associated. The action (well that's when it gets around to it) is too little and unexciting martial arts... because we have to wait through long dry spells of talk. The climax battle is the only thing worth waiting around for. Not helping is that the twists in the story are plain easy to pick up on and it doesn't make too much sense. Wow, just look at the names! The main reason I decided to give it a look. The likes of Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasence and Barbara Bach are simply wasted, and Joe Lewis is just too deadpan in the lead role. Fun this is not. No wonder why it's not too well known, as it's largely dismissible.

Legendary heavyweight kickboxing champion Joe Lewis kicks off his mysteriously brief movie career with this globe trotting martial arts actioner in which he assumes the eponymous role of The Jaguar, a sort of James Bond type agent sans the gadgets (other than his lethal fists and feet)

The first thing that becomes immediately apparent whilst watching, is that a large amount of money was put into this judging by the multiple foreign locations and some of the incredible cast that has been assembled here. Such cinematic luminaries as John Huston, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance and Woody Strode all put in appearances! (albeit briefly) Also along for the ride is the familiar and welcome face of Anthony De Longis as Jaguar's friend and fellow agent.

All well and good so far then.....however it has to be said that for what is ostensibly an action movie, there is in fact far too little action on offer here. The majority of the films running time is taken with our hero jet setting from one beautiful location to another searching for clues as to the identity of an international drug dealer who in a somewhat lame and predictable twist at the end is revealed to be.....well I won't say it here.

Still, despite the above criticism the action sequences when they do arrive, turn out to be very exciting indeed. The final climatic fight especially, set atop the scenic splendour of an old castle, between Jaguar and his nemesis is very exciting and well handled.

It's rather sad that other than a tiny handful of other films, Lewis never further pursued his movie career. From the evidence here, although obviously not trained as an actor he nonetheless possessed a rather powerful on screen presence in much the same manner as the likes of the late great Charles Bronson.

Overall then, the film is certainly worth a watch for fans of martial arts, not least of all to see a genuine kickboxing legend in action, although it has to be said that it could have been so much better with less of the excessive talking and a bit more of the said action.

Jaguar Lives! Is a strangely shot yet alluring yarn about globetrotting martial arts expert Joe Lewis who works on a ranch with sensei Woody Strode, somewhere in Spain. The entire movie was filmed in Spain in September 1978. When Lewis' services are needed, a goddess (Barbara Bach) arrives from the sky in a helicopter to tell Lewis where to go and what to do. It jumps around a bit. I didn't really try to understand what was going on too much, and found it to be an interesting watch, not so much for the plot. It's sort of James Bond meets Mission Impossible meets Steven Seagal meets Beverly Hills Ninja. Being familiar with Lee, Pleasance, Strode, and Bach, I figured a movie with that cast couldn't be too bad. And it wasn't. Lee is his typical staid and villainous self. Donald Pleasance is especially amusing in his role as a dictator, but it is only slightly more than a cameo appearance. The reason I watched was because of Bach, with Jaguar Lives! coming up on a search result for her. She was good as always but her parts too few and far between. Lewis, who was a complete unknown to me, pretty much hogs the screen. I would've liked to see more of Bach, obviously, but Lewis was actually better than i expected him to be, and this is a martial arts movie, so for what it is, i think it succeeds to an extent. Watch it twice if you don't believe me.

I had first recorded this off late-night Italian TV but, thankfully, had not yet checked the movie out before it turned up in English: a vague James Bond rip-off in which the protagonist (one Joe Lewis) happens to be a martial arts expert – for the record, the two styles had already clashed, far more successfully, in Bruce Lee's last-completed and best vehicle i.e. ENTER THE DRAGON (1973). Even if the producers of this one were wily enough to recruit a roster of co-stars – no fewer than 5 of whom had appeared in previous Bond extravaganzas (Barbara Bach, John Huston, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasence and Joseph Wiseman)! – the result is, while not boring, hardly thrilling, in spite their being practically no let-up to the action!!

Incidentally, much is made of the mysterious identity of the chief villain (at least, they had the good sense to not cast an established actor in the role – who would have invariably blown the hero out of the water in that department!) when the pre-credits sequence gives this away all-too-plainly!! Lewis' "sensei" is Woody Strode and, among his adversaries, is Capucine (who, having failed to dispatch the "Jaguar" herself, later calls on Lee and insists to be informed when this is finally accomplished!); the latter, however, displays an admirable code of ethics when he lets Lewis go after he has repeatedly defeated his goons inside a Japanese cemetery! Wiseman plays blind and Huston (amusingly, his character is named Ralph Richards!) wheelchair-bound, so that only Pleasence has fun as the self-appointed but – inevitably – cowardly dictator of a banana republic.

As I said, the action highlights (personally choreographed by the leading man) are not exactly ground-breaking and too often merely silly – at one point, he takes on a gang of motorcycle thugs, not to mention the various minions at a factory, whom he overcomes not via his usual karate moves but by throwing every kind of accessory which comes his way at any approaching assailant!; then again, it must be pointed out that director Pintoff had started out in animation. The film, at the very least looks good – helped in no small measure by the globe-trotting nature of the plot – but, atypically, Lewis proves oddly resistant to female company (save for ex-colleague Sally Faulkner, who has improbably forsaken espionage for a nun's habit!). The concluding moments show the protagonist once again having his training sessions interrupted by the arrival of agent Bach…but, unsurprisingly, no sequel ever surfaced (or was likely ever commissioned, though the star would in fact return to the big screen for FORCE: FIVE {1981}, directed by ENTER THE DRAGON's own Robert Clouse!).

I actually couldn't care less about lame Kung-Fu movies; however I am strangely fascinated by insignificant B-movies that assemble impressive ensemble casts even though everything else about it absolutely sucks. "Jaguar Lives!" is a terrific example of this, if there ever was one. This is without a doubt one of the dumbest, most redundant, most intolerable and dullest flicks ever made, but would you look at that cast! The titular hero is a total nobody – and remained a total nobody even though this dud was supposed to launch his acting career – but would you just take a look at the names surrounding him! It's like an unofficial James Bond reunion where only the coolest people received an invitation: Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance, the stunningly beautiful Barbara Bach, Joseph Wiseman and – just for fun's sake – Woody Strode and John Huston. The issue, however, is that all these great people only appear for a mere couple of minutes and I bet all my money that none of them had a clue what this movie was about. The whole thing is just a dire excuse to showcase Joe Lewis' admittedly smooth Kung-Fu moves (watch him kick two naughty villains off their bikes at once in impressive slow-motion) and to travel around the most dreamy exotic locations in the world to tell an inexistent story about an international drug network. Moreover, the identity of the criminal mastermind is so goddamn obvious straight from the beginning that the attempts to hide his face or cover up the sound of his voice are downright hilarious. Donald Pleasance clearly had a fun day depicting a cartoonesque South American dictator, but the rest of them are just performing on automatic pilot and appear to be clinically dead. The explosions and car crashes look incredibly amateurish and Ernest Pintoff's direction is as uninspired as can be. Somehow this turkey received a beautiful and luxurious DVD-release even though it hardly deserves such a treatment. There are far better contemporary cult flicks out there that sadly remain stuck in obscurity. But hey, if you want to have a good laugh or wish to pointlessly kill off a couple of your brain cells, you can't go wrong with "Jaguar Lives!"