THE CHINESE TYPEWRITER (1979)

A bad guy steals an airliner by simply flying off in it. The owner hires two detectives, Tom Selleck and James Whitmore, Jr., (or “Whitemore” as that one newspaper clipping shown below says) to get it back. Boring stuff happens and our heroes come up with a plan to say they have a bogus blueprint for a “Chinese typewriter”. What the fuck? I watched the entire movie and I still don't understand the story.

The only reason this unsold pilot even has a minor footnote in movie history is it has a few connections to the 1980’s television program “Magnum, P.I.” As a fan of that show, I thought it’d be fun to check out THE CHINESE TYPEWRITER. Wrong. While I do understand my thinking from a few hours ago…the reality has been nothing but pain and boredom. I wish I knew karate so I could dropkick this smelly DVD into a tree shredder.

Lifeless acting, underdeveloped (and boring) characters, weak action scenes, unfunny humor (I’m talking Nikki Glaser-level antifunny), needlessly confusing story, bland camerawork, a newspaper featuring a reversed photograph from a scene that takes place later in the movie (what is this LADY TERMINATOR? Or the TV-edit of EARTHQUAKE?), slow pace, multiple annoying usages of the term “percentage play”, wasted scenery.

The few connections to Magnum are interesting (I guess), but not worth wasting the 77 minutes it takes to watch this turkey. The most unusual is a small cutscene of a beachside shower that was later used in a Season 1 episode of Magnum. That was just odd.