Super
Spy! Ok not really but that has a better sound to it than Super Courier!
In the current day we would call him a Transporter. Fred Williamson is Bolt.
Cool down to his skivvies. Walks into a room and every woman wants him and
every man wants to be him. Or kill him. His million dollar smile brims with
over confidence. His thin cigars are a punctuation mark. His immaculate suits
are never wrinkled. He is tied to a table and being tortured? No big deal.
Breaks loose, kills the torturer and blows the place up. And in Bond fashion
when he sees that the villain has a sexy mistress, he sleeps with her and
writes Happy Chinese New Year on her naked back. Why? Because he is Bolt.
Bolt goes up against a man with a silencer and kills him with a shard of
broken glass. From 20 feet away and then throws him down the laundry chute.
But leaves the dead woman in the room because he is a gentleman.
A fun no-brains-needed action film that I thought might be one of those co-productions
with the Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest like Shatter or That Man from Hong
Kong. It isn't but much of it takes place in Hong Kong and it has that same
feel, that same energy. It is sometimes thrown into the Blaxploitation category
because the lead actor is black, but it doesn't come close. There are no
rough edges here, no racial angst - just a slick operator who always has
the upper hand. A whole lot closer to Bond or Helms than Shaft. Now with
Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem and Three the Hard Way, Williamson was definitely
a star of that genre and so perhaps it was easy to just call it Blaxploitation.
Bolt is a courier of highly priced merchandise. One of the best men in the
field. In Hong Kong he is hired by a large rotund man in a bowler hat who
should have been played by Robert Morley but instead is portrayed by Byron
Webster in Morley fashion. There is a million dollars US in a briefcase and
all Bolt has to do is transport it to Mexico City through Los Angeles. A
million dollars was clearly worth a lot more back then because killers try
and get it every step of the way. In Los Angeles he is waylaid and the deaths
mount up. So back to Hong Kong he goes. He wants to even up the score of
some dead friends. Apparently, Universal planned on making this a series.
Unfortunately, they backed off after this one.
