Jaguar Lives!

"Jaguar Lives!" is the first of 12 movies made by Joe Lewis, a guy who was one of the top martial artists during his day. And, as I watched this film, I was impressed by his skills...they were far better than most martial arts films of the era. In other words, he's NOT faking it...the guy is tough and his kicks and punches are pretty scary! Yet, despite this, Lewis' career never really took off and he was not the next Chuck Norris or Jackie Chan.

Whoever made "Jaguar Lives!" managed to get quite a few famous actors for the movie...something unusual for a movie starring an unknown. I saw the film simply because Christopher Lee was in the film, though he is only one of many famous folks in the movie.

Jaguar is a codename for Jonathan Cross (Lewis), an agent working for G6...some top secret American governmental organization. He's out to travel the world tracking down various elements of an international drug cartel. Again and again, after meeting with these evil characters, they set their goons on Jaguar and repeatedly he beats the snot out of them. Can he manage to destroy this international organization of evil?

I've already mentioned the positive things about the movie. On the negative side, the editing is lousy and it makes the transition from one country to another very abrupt and cheap looking. Also, Lewis' acting skills are only fair. And, finally, the script itself manages to be rather boring. But the worst was at the end with the big confrontation scene. It clearly was DARK...nighttime.

Yet, moments later it looks as if the story is taking place around noon!! Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Despite this it's not a terrible film but one that could have been better.

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!).

This was the first movie role for karate and kickboxing Champion Joe Lewis, whom director Pintoff described as "a cross between the sensitivity of James Dean, the rage of a young Marlon Brando, and the flamboyance of Errol Flynn". Let's say this was a slight misjudgment for a young man without any acting experience. Lewis could have played a supporting role as a fighter, but here he has more dialog than Clint Eastwood in five movies. Joe's hair is growing longer or shorter, being colored brighter or darker, changing from scene to scene, so his coiffeur could probably tell in which order the scenes were shot. After "Jaguar Lives", Lewis was never asked to fulfil the contract for 4 movies he had signed.

"Jaguar Lives" is a bizarre combination of expensive Hollywood hubris and cheap action trash. On one hand, they got plenty of stars like Donald Pleasance, Christopher Lee, Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No), Barbara Bach and even ancient Hollywood legend John Huston (in a wheelchair!). On the other hand, they used a script which is a random collection of scenes without any story or character development (Lewis fights one boss in Hong Kong, one boss in Rome, one boss in wherever, while an off-screen narrator - always the last means of help if nobody understands the story - explains they all work for the same criminal network).

The funniest scene is when Donald Pleasance as general boasts about his precious helicopter with machine guns and rockets, promptly stolen by Lewis - and you see him take off in a totally unarmed old chopper which barely flies. An episode of the TV series "Airwolf" must have had a higher budget than this epic.

"Jaguar Lives" at least has a couple of good fights, a brave star who does dangerous stunts (even the 'cling to the car roof' scene) himself, some funny moments (Donald Pleasance seems to enjoy the part of the general) and is watchable once, but it feels like a disaster of a movie from the moment when Woody Strode watches Joe's Tai Chi practice and tells him how awesome he is. The audience never shares the feeling.

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!"

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.