Fathom
by Leslie H. Martinson
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DVD details
Actor: Anthony Franciosa, Greta Chi, Raquel Welch, Richard Briers, Ronald FraserDirector: Leslie H. Martinson
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-07-16
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of Fathom
DVD Review: Pretty Pictures
Summary: 3 Stars
I guess I'm on a babe kick. Much like the last film I watched which mostly exists to display the ample charms of Jennifer Connelly (CAREER OPPORTUNITIES), this is a showcase for the 27-year-old Raquel Welch, clad in a variety of bikinis, one-piece swimsuits, and typically 60s bizarro bright-colored mod miniskirts and short dresses. I'll tell you right off the bat that if you're not watching this for her, or because you're obsessed with seeing every 60s film that got made directly as a result of the James Bond craze, you could well end up being a little bit disappointed.
Raquel plays Fathom Harvill; her first name gets explained a couple of different times as having different meanings, a joke which has some ramifications in the film (nobody - except, it seems, Fathom - is telling the truth about anything) but gets old quickly as does most of the humor here. The actual storyline is complex without being really very interesting: young dental hygienist/skydiver Fathom is recruited as a one-time agent to recover a sensitive piece of nuclear equipment from wealthy arms merchants on the coast of Spain, but quickly finds out that the British agents who hired her (Ronald Fraser and Richard Briers) may not be who they seem to be; the nuclear device may in fact not exist, but there's a valuable Chinese antique that these guys and an American who might have defected to China during the Korean war (Anthony Franciosa) are looking for, along with a Russian antiquities collector (Clive Revill). Everybody's lying, and Raquel's on the run most of the time, but it never feels very compelling and director Leslie H. Martinson, mostly known for his TV work, just doesn't seem to be able to build any excitement.
Still the location work on the Mediterranean coast is nice enough, and Raquel is pretty stunning, and shown off to great advantage throughout. And there are moments where it seems like the film is going to go deeper into it's "who is lying to who and for what reason" plot, and one thing we do keep wondering about is whether Raquel's own character is in fact something more than just a pretty face. There's a cute little twist at the very end, after a too-long airplane chase, for example, that had me imagining that it might have been intended as the first in a series of films starring a more and more confident Fathom as a real Bond competitor. It never happened of course, and this is far from the best of the films that followed in Bond's wake so it has largely fallen by the wayside - had it been anybody but Raquel or someone with a similar level of sexy superstardom (Brigitte Bardot?) I suspect it would be totally forgotten. I liked ogling Raquel enough to not be too bored, but I doubt I'll ever bother with a rewatch; more likely I'll head back to James Coburn in the Flint movies, or Dean Martin's Matt Helm when I want a dose of goofy 60s spy stuff.
This DVD, now apparently out of print, is fine; the colors seem just a touch muted at times but are certainly acceptable, and sound and Cinemascope image are very clear. No extras worth mentioning.
Description of Fathom
A certain lime-green bikini reaches icon status in Fathom, clinging as tightly to Raquel Welch as those phagocytes that attacked her in Fantastic Voyage. Raquel was the reigning sex goddess of the moment, which is all you need to know about Fathom, an otherwise extremely silly example of proto-Austin Powers spy spoofery. She's a poster come to life, and the movie is geared around her '60s outfits (a purple-and-cornflower ensemble is particularly stupefying), her orange-peach lipstick, and the way her hair seems perfectly in place even after a high-speed boat chase. Sadly, Raquel's dialogue delivery is as stiff as her brunette mane, but the movie perks up when she is chased around by an angry bull, a sequence that may have you wondering whether you ate some bad cheese. By the way, her character is a dental assistant, visiting Spain as part of a skydiving troupeBestsellers in DVD
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