The “ludicrous” action movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Another mindless slog”
Unless they’re truly unique and unlike anything cinema has seen before, and there aren’t many that can make that claim to fame, action movies are generally obligated to tick a certain number of boxes. However, it’s all about how well those boxes are ticked, and there was one film Roger Ebert believed failed on all fronts.
For example, Die Hard completely changed the face of the genre when it was first released, and in the three and a half decades since Bruce Willis first ran barefoot around the Nakatomi Plaza, John McTiernan’s classic has spawned dozens upon dozens of thinly-veiled imitators and blatant ripoffs.
However, some of them are actually pretty good. Speed, The Rock, Air Force One, and Con Air are all basically ‘Die Hard on [insert location/mode of transport here] flicks, but they’re eminently watchable and massively entertaining in their own right because the filmmakers and the cast understood the assignment.
John Wick has so far given rise to three sequels, a TV series, and a spinoff, and it’s all because somebody killed Keanu Reeves’ dog. The Matrix? That’s a different case. When the Wachowskis’ sci-fi epic became the most influential turn-of-the-millennium blockbuster, Hollywood was suddenly awash with gun-fu and leather outfits, and it was clear the siblings had caught lightning in a bottle because none of them came close.
The point is that it’s entirely within the realms of possibility to turn a formulaic actioner into a decent and potentially great movie. The issues arise when it becomes obvious that everybody involved is painting by numbers, which is exactly how Ebert felt about 1992’s Rapid Fire.
Starting his 1.5-star review as he meant to go on, Ebert called it “a movie weary almost unto death with the sameness of its genre,” summarising it as “another mindless slog through the familiar materials of drug dealing, the Mafia, and the martial arts,” with a plot that’s “been pieced together from countless other movies.”
So far, so accurate, with the late Brandon Lee, who Ebert called “not a particularly riveting actor,” playing an out of his depth student who witnesses a murder and becomes embroiled in a deadly game between an organised crime syndicate and a cabal of corrupt cops, which he manages to overcome thanks to his handy martial arts prowess in a plot he surmised as “a mite ludicrous”.
“The filmmakers consider the plot only a clothesline on which to hang five major martial arts sequences,” Ebert continued. “All of which illustrate three ancient standbys from my Glossary of Movie Terms.” The offending trio is made up of bad guys talking instead of killing the hero, the villains having terrible aim while the protagonist happens to be a master marksman, and the old favourite of goons attacking one at a time.
Look, Rapid Fire didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel. Lee showed flashes of charisma and clearly took after his father in the hand-to-hand combat stakes, but Ebert wanted to see something new, fresh, or even remotely different. That’s not what he got, and he left feeling that the film was as stale as week-old bread.
