From: rdd@cactus.org (Robert Dorsett)
Subject: REVIEW: RAPID FIRE
Reply-To: rdd@cactus.org (Robert Dorsett)
Organization: Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society, Austin, Tx
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 20:22:13 GMT
Followup-To: rec.arts.movies
Summary: r.a.m.r. #01499
Keywords: author=Dorsett

				  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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