The Destructors
The Destructors (1968) Rewatch: ✅
I have watched this on Prime a few years back but I’d forgotten most of it so it seemed ripe for a rewatch and pretty low effort (on my part) stuff.
Mildly concerned that I’ve picked the wrong time to watch this, two episodes into Jason King is maybe not the right moment to be watching another playboy crime buster because, well, how are you even supposed to get close to Wyngarde ? It’s unpossible.
Richard Egan just doesn’t cut it for me. Dude’s only got one expression throughout the whole film and you need at least six by my reckoning.
I did kinda enjoy the film but more in that “there’s nothing else on the TV of a Sunday afternoon” kind of way than for the spy and crime hijinks. It doesn’t really get more exciting than this one guy (the master of disguise) in the film who wears his hat on a weird angle, which is fine and the film is fine and we’ve all tried wearing a hat at a funny angle so we can all relate.
Personally, I’m more down for overtly camp and eurospy because without that, yer spy bloke just comes off as a tiresome lech and so it is here. Not Egan’s fault, you can only work with what you’ve got and he clearly got handed nothing much. Probably explains the singular expression.
Watchable then, enjoyable enough, just completely unexceptional in every possible way. One for the background and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself watching it again in a year or so having once again forgotten everything about it and coming to the same conclusion a third time.