If you are famous and popular enough, Hollywood would let you become not only a protagonist but also a star of your own action film. If you are really famous and popular, it would happen years after a conventional biopic in which you were played by an upcoming Hollywood star. To achieve that, you need to be someone very special, and the famous daredevil Evel Knievel was that kind of person, starring as himself in Viva Knievel!, a 1977 action-adventure film directed by Gordon Douglas.
Knievel owed his fame to his death-defying spectacular motorcycle jumps, which often didn’t go as planned, sometimes with terrible injuries and making spectators wonder whether that jump would be his last. That almost happened during the 1975 jump at Wembley Stadium, an event which was reconstructed in the first part of the film, with scenes that include actual documentary footage. The plot is, however, fictional and shows how Evel Knievel and his long-time mechanic and former mentor William Atkins (played by Gene Kelly) get into trouble when their travelling caravan becomes part of the diabolical plan of a major cocaine smuggler, Millard (played by Leslie Nielsen). Evel is lured into a motorcycle-jumping tour of Mexico where Millard and his cohorts plan to sabotage Knievel’s motorcycle in order to kill him and use his caravan as cover to return to the USA with US$50 million worth of drugs. In order to carry out the plan, Millard has recruited Jessie (played by Marjoe Gortner), a young motorcycle stuntman and Knievel’s former protégé, to spy on Knievel’s team, but Jessie’s drug use and desire to become the new Evel Knievel would ironically spoil the villain’s plans.
Evel Knievel was a talented stuntman and an accomplished self-promoter, but he definitely wasn’t an actor. This becomes apparent even with a script that takes into consideration the limits of his acting abilities, which become apparent when he shares the screen with more talented and experienced members of the cast. Gene Kelly, former star of light-hearted Classic Hollywood musicals, delivers a surprisingly dramatic performance in the role of an alcoholic wreck who also has the misfortune to be drugged and sent to a psychiatric clinic in the film, as well as being burdened with a subplot about an estranged son. Knievel’s acting looks bad even in scenes with cast members hired mainly for their looks, which include the famous model Lauren Hutton playing photographer Kate Morgan, who becomes some sort of love interest for the protagonist despite Knievel inconveniently having a wife and children in real life. The impression of the film, however, improves due to action scenes and stunt work, which are predictably better than the acting, while Knievel’s explicit anti-drug sermons and attempts to show that his heart was in the right place give enough flavour to make at least some viewers like this film. Viva Knievel!, however, proved to be something of a swan song for Knievel’s career; only months after the premiere, an incident involving a baseball bat and a Hollywood studio executive resulted in a jail sentence, cancelled product endorsement deals and the film sinking into oblivion.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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