The bad news is that Fathom is just like the tedious Charade. The worse news is that it doesn’t star Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
As with Charade, it’s one of those boring and confusing games of “who do you trust.” With basically three sets of characters periodically lying to Fathom (Raquel Welch) about their true motives in trying to recover some stolen doodad called the Fire Dragon, the movie attempts to derive its suspense from keeping the audience off balance as to who the good guys really are.
But since it’s just a matter of characters announcing every so often that they’re really the good guys and that some other character has lied to Fathom, you lose interest and begin to wonder just what went wrong with star Tony Franciosa’s acting career that he never really broke out and became the superstar he seemed to have the charisma to warrant.
Fathom is a dental assistant who is also quite proficient in sky diving and is currently on vacation in Spain doing some jumping with her sky diving buddies. After making a jump, she’s given a ride by a guy and instead of taking her to town he takes her to H.A.D.E.S. headquarters. She should have known this group wasn’t on the up and up after seeing that their secret HQ is a trailer parked on a beach and manned by one old English chap with a limp.
These two guys give her some song and dance about a missing H bomb that was ultimately recovered but a remote triggering device for it called the Fire Dragon was still missing. There’s a couple of folks in the area besides H.A.D.E.S. who are looking to get their hands on the Fire Dragon to sell to a foreign government. H.A.D.E.S. wants Fathom to parachute into these bad guys’ compound and activate a bug they have planted there. Since she’s a pretty gal, she can just pretend she got blown off course once she’s finished her secret mission and the bad guys will let her go.
All goes according to plan except that once Fathom parachutes in, she finds a dead body and is photographed by Tony Franciosa (Tenebre) while holding the murder weapon. Tony plays Peter Merriweather, one of the bad guys the English goons were peeing their pants over.
Peter is a smooth operator and questions Fathom about what she’s doing there. She maintains her cover story so Peter takes her and the corpse to the nearest town. (Well, the corpse he dumps off a cliff since corpses have a nasty tendency to interest the Spanish police.)
Once back in town, Fathom gets mixed up with H.A.D.E.S. again and this time they have intercepted something or other that leads them to believe that the Fire Dragon is on board the yacht of one Sergi Serapkin. Sergi is pretty much the only bad guy in this movie who is up front for the duration about his motivations and even comments on this fact towards the end of the movie when all the involved parties end up stuck together on a train.
Sergi affects a pretty awful accent of dubious origin and claims that his body temperature is ten degrees cooler than the normal person. This has no bearing on anything beyond giving a villain a reason to be all bundled up. He also has picked up a bad guy haircut and goatee along with a monocle to complete the package.
The movie is full of chases, shifting allegiances, and costume changes for Raquel, but in this particular case, that doesn’t necessarily translate into compelling entertainment. There are times in this movie where Fathom has pointless encounters with characters merely so that things can appear even more convoluted than would otherwise be the case.
In particular is a sequence where she gets involved with the guy that owns the hotel that she’s staying at. Noticing the same camera flaw in all the pictures he takes matches the one she saw in a picture of the Fire Dragon, she realizes he has something to do with the elusive jewel. Likewise, he notices her interest in his camera’s flaw and realizes she is interested in the Fire Dragon as well.
So what does he do? He takes her out to the spot in the ocean waters where the Fire Dragon is stashed and then ends up trying to harpoon her after she tries to pull the harpoon gun on him. Why would he take her with him when he knows that she knows something is up? It serves to fill in some holes in the story (i.e. the guy that Peter heaved off the cliff earlier) but there’s no reason beyond that for it to have occurred.
The various action sequences aren’t handled with any kind of aplomb by director Leslie H. Martinson either. They almost all drag on way too long and what should have been exciting turns into a protracted series of long, location shots interspersed with really bad close ups with the main characters superimposed over the action.
There’s the really long opening with Raquel sky diving (which followed the very dull opening credit sequence where we had to watch Raquel roll up her parachute for minutes on end), there’s the long speedboat chase, the long chase where a bull was after Fathom (and actually look to have gored her twice!), and the long airplane chase at the conclusion of the film. All of these were twice as long as warranted and lost whatever effectiveness they might have otherwise have had.
For their parts, Tony and Raquel don’t really get on your nerves and she actually comes across as someone capable of not only wearing mod costumes of varying length but also carrying a picture on her own. Tony and her look like they could banter back and forth, but the movie’s script doesn’t really give them much of an opportunity. Not a great film by any stretch, but if you’re a fan of Raquel and her various assets, it won’t be terribly uncomfortable to sit through. (Well, not in a bad way.)
© 2009 MonsterHunter
