A professor, who has been paralyzed in an attack by mob hitmen, builds a suit that enables him to walk and fight crime.
Exo-man was a really good effort considering the technology of the time. Had the film been made today it would probably look much better. In this film Our hero, Nicholas Conrad, (David Ackroyd) is a physics professor and research scientist. He is also an avid jogger with a drive for competition, and of course strong moral convictions.
He is in a bank and witnesses a robbery. After the gunmen leave, he chases one down and catches him. He turns his captive over to the police. Turns out the captive is the son of an organized crime boss, so the police give Nicholas 24 hour protection in return for his promise to testify.
Nicholas begins to get threatening phone calls suggesting he decide not to testify.
His car is blown up, killing his student research assistant (A. Martinez). He says he will still testify.
He gets physically attacked, despite his police protection, and winds up in a wheel chair unable to walk, but he will still testify.
His girlfriend Emily Frost (Anne Schedeen) is threatened, so he decides not to testify.
Full of self pity, he retreats to his lab where he finds his dead assistant made a breakthrough. Though the formula was not written down, Nicholas uses the sample to make a material to help him regain his mobility. The material forms a suit, and a large plastic shell fits over it. The shell makes him look rather alien. Although he can walk in the suit, he can only move very stiffly and slowly. The suit grants him great strength and is bullet proof.
Nicholas sends Emily out of town and uses the suit to go after the man who crippled him. and in the ensuing low speed chase the man falls from a rooftop and is killed.
A government agent named Travis, (Harry Morgan) arrives and tried to convince Nicholas to testify, showing him who the captive ban robber's father really is.
Going after the crime boss, we see one of the best scenes of the film. Two men in a jeep fire an automatic weapon at Exo-man, and the bullets bounce off. They try to run him over with the Jeep. Exo-man outs his hands out and stops the Jeep cold. The two men fly out. Nicholas being a Physics professor understood conservation of momentum.
Proving that this was an attempt at a pilot for a potential TV series, at the end, Travis returns saying he found evidence against the crime boss left in his trash can after an anonymous call told him to look. He then offers to show Nicholas other cases he is working on.
