RAPID FIRE
A film review by Robert Dorsett
Copyright 1992 Robert Dorsett
Spoilers follow, mainly for those who have *never* seen a movie of this type, before. But if you're that young, you shouldn't see this thing, anyway, so..:-)
The hype surrounding RAPID FIRE has been unbelievable. "Brandon Lee better than his father!" "Brandon Lee charismatic!" "Watch out Van Damme!" Blah blah blah.
It's all BS. Why? Because, unlike his father, and unlike other "minor-league" action leads, such as Norris, Van Damme, Lundgren, etc--Brandon has no screen presence. He has no charisma. He is not a leading man. And, worse still, rather than being violent, macho, a personality someone might even respect, he comes across as *creepy* and violent. If he has any future in the movies, he might well work as a villain, but a leading man, he isn't.
What makes this even worse is that the bad guys, played by Nick "Stingray" Mancuso, and Tao Lzu, chewed up every single scene they were in. By the end, we're really rooting for the bad guys, more than the good guys. Let the man with any semblance of character, win.
In fact, come to think of it, we rarely see Lee in the same frame with *any* other actor. There's a reason: he turns into wallpaper.
(Note, however, that I'd never say any of this to his face, since he does seem to have some very nicely choreographed moves :-))
And then there's the story. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting distinctly bored with movies of this type--buddie flicks, set in Chicago, with a Horner/clone sound-track, and wet city streets. They're all the same, they're all fake, they're all implausible, and they're all *boring*. And we seem to get about half a dozen a year. I don't think that Hollywood's ever dipped into a single formula as extensively as this type of movie, which emerged over the last ten years. Even more than Siskel & Ebert's peeve against "buddy movies," "wet city streets" is becoming a sure tip-off of abject mediocrity.
RAPID FIRE starts out in (apparently) Thailand, in an interesting setting-- a river transfer point, which we're expected to believe is in the Golden Triangle, and the base of Tao's headquarters. Based on that scene, this movie *could* have worked as an equivalent crime drama in, say, Bangkok, letting the "environment" outweigh the preposterousness, but a movie like this has no budget to do a movie like that.
Basic story. Mancuso plays an over-the-hill US crime boss. He visits Tao in his layer, to borrow money, get a piece of his action. Most of his men are in jail, and he can't hold his own, any more. Tao was a messenger, who has now made it REAL big. In the process of asking, he humiliates Tao, in front of his men, but for some inexplicable reason, is allowed out with his life. Well, okay.
Cut back to the US. Lee plays the son of a US Army intelligence agent who got run over by a tank at Tiananmen. He's now a cynical art student, avoiding political causes. He's tricked to go to a political fund-raiser, which happens to be sponsored by a prominent regional distributor. While there, that smuggler is axed by Mancuso, who Lee sees. Mancuso then decides that he *must* kill Lee, the mistake of his life. And it goes on and on.
Among the many implausibilities:
- Why didn't Tao whack Mancuso after Mancuso killed his
distributor? Why wasn't there *any* violence from that
direction?
- Why did Tao show up at the end, to personally oversee the
deliveries?
- Who the hell was Powers Boothe supposed to be, and why was his
headquarters in a bowling alley?
- Why did the FBI agent miss Lee, an unarmed man, a stationary
target, in a well-lighted, closed hallway, fifteen feet away,
by over a yard and a half? Don't they teach shooting at
Quantico anymore, even to bad cops? I think the movie lost me
at that point (0:35).
- Why does Lee like to play with his victims, before killing them? 'Tisn't very plausible most of the time: the forces of darkness descending upon him, bullets all over the place, and he's playing kung fu with some poor soul. If they're gonna make it plausible, at least make the other guy a reasonable opponent: if a "fist-of-death" hit *hits*, the other guy's going down. Spare us the gymnastics: that's once nice aspect of Chuck Norris's movies--they've never really had the dancing (except for reverse roundhouse kicks, of course :-)), but they're slightly more plausible because of that.
- Why did Tao, such a cool character at the beginning, end up such
a weak weenie at the end? Why Lee's spectacular fight with his
henchman, even though we were being built up to expect it
between Lee and Tao?
Overall, by about hour into the movie, I was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable about having wasted my matinee dough to see this thing. At the end, I was embarrassed. And I *like* dumb action flicks!
This movie is so bad, and so cliche-ridden, that it deserves no consideration; the only reason I'm reviewing it is to save other people the pain of seeing it. One star: don't even waste money for it on video. See it on an airplane. Don't rent the headsets. See UNFORGIVEN, the best movie of the year, instead.
Incidentally, there were *five* people in the audience, including myself. In past weeks, I've seen UNFORGIVEN, and was dragged to THE THREE NINJAS. UNFORGIVEN was *packed*, on the same day and time; THREE NINJAS was half full. This movie smells like a *bomb*. Perhaps Bruce Lee's been dead too long for Junior to ride on his father's coat-tails; as a nephew said, "Bruce who? Was he like Van Damme?"
--- Robert Dorsett rdd@cactus.org ...cs.utexas.edu!cactus.org!rdd
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