Jacob Gallery

" The Challenge " is a greatly underrated movie and like many others of its kind, has been forgotten to those people with the power, authority, and influence to have the original film re-mastered and issued on DVD.

Fans will notice the premise behind the U.S. and its Asian adversary choosing unpredictable warriors who think outside the box. For such an extreme mission with so much riding on the results, intelligent men in power realized that a super-soldier who obeys authority and acts by the rules is also a liability in that he is predictable. He will go by the book and if the enemy knows "the book", then the enemy can anticipated what his adversary will do next. Surprisingly, even the Asian country understands this by choosing the loud-mouthed, unintentionally funny Yuro (Mako).

One thing fans will ponder. With all the equipment issued to Jacob Gallery, why didn't his backers issue him basic antibiotics? Jacob Gallery scratches his leg on a razor blade booby trap left by Yuro and in the steamy jungle climate quickly incurs septicemia, aka, blood poisoning via infection.

Adversary Yuro (Mako), inexplicably goes out of his mind, deliberately exposing himself and yelling all over the island for Gallery, as if he were invulnerable.

The unique aspect of this man-to-man individual combat is that neither of them actually comes to physical blows with one another! But towards the end of the movie, each one looks as if a baseball bat had been applied to both.

Can you believe that Jacob Gallery asks for only one million dollars tax free as his payment? True, a million dollars was more in 1970, but still Gallery could have asked for more, such as 3 or 4 million, and would have gotten away with it.