If this sounds perhaps a mite ludicrous, it’s because the filmmakers consider the plot only a clothesline on which to hang five major martial arts sequences, all of which illustrate three ancient standbys from my Bigger Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer Syndrome (in which the bad guys talk when they should be shooting), the Principle of Evil Marksmanship (no bad guy can hit anything with a gun, while no good guy ever misses), and the One-at-a-Time Attack Rule (in martial arts movies, the enemies obligingly approach the hero one by one).
Brandon Lee is an adequate martial arts performer, if not a particularly riveting actor, although he has his work cut out for him in a movie where the drugs are smuggled in as starch in bed linens, and then removed in a laundry. But what can we make of the rest of the film?
The screenplay is so absentminded that it provides a love scene between Lee and Kate Hodge (as a good Chicago cop) without remembering that up to that point their only relationship consisted of Lee taking her hostage during a shoot-out. Powers Boothe, as the movie’s other good cop, has such deathless lines as “Why don’t you take your fists of fury and get out of here?” And Mancuso, who informs Lee he is going to break his fingers one at a time, seems to run a Mafia empire that consists of a lot of guys who are always sitting around in an Italian restaurant, eating.
Where is the audience for a movie like this? It’s out there, I guess. Martial arts movies generally make their money back and then some, perhaps because their fans are connoisseurs who evaluate the fight scenes and don’t mind that the dialogue is brainless. Truly inspired action scenes do, of course, have a special energy of their own. Rapid Fire is not truly or any other kind of inspired.
Reach the Rock
(Directed by William Ryan; starring Allesandro Nivola, Bruce Norris; 1998)
Reach the Rock plays like an experiment to see how much a movie can be slowed down before it stops. It was produced and written by John Hughes, who should have donated his screenplay to a nearby day-care center for use by preschoolers in constructing paper chains. How can the man who made Plains, Trains and Automobiles have thought this material was filmable?
The story involves an unhappy young man named Robin (Allesandro Nivola), who in the opening scene uses a flagpole to break the window of a hardware store. When Ernie the small-town cop (Bruce Norris) arrives, he finds Robin seated in a beach chair before the window, cooling himself with an electric fan. Robin is returned to the station, where the only other cop on the overnight shift is Sergeant Phil Quinn (William Sadler).
Robin is well known to the officers. His arrest sheet lists such offenses as loitering, disturbing the peace, vandalism, and so on. The sergeant and the kid dislike one another, and the actors demonstrate this with various reliable techniques, including the always dependable flaring of the nostrils.
The cops lock Robin in a cell. He steals the keys to the cell, lets himself out, steals a squad car, drives downtown, fires a shotgun through a coffee-shop window, returns, and locks himself back in. This is a pattern that will repeat itself many times during the long night. “How are you gettin’ out of here?” asks Sergeant Quinn, convinced that Robin is the culprit. It never occurs to him to search the prisoner for the keys. I can’t say much for his police work. (That line is borrowed from Fargo, a movie I thought of during this one as a drowning man will think of an inflatable whale.)
Robin’s sneaky activities unfold with the velocity of sleepwalking. There are two cells in the jail, and at various times Robin is locked in both, Ernie is locked in one, Quinn is locked in the other, a bunk catches fire, Robin’s old girlfriend is locked in with him, and Quinn is locked out of the building. Sounds like a maelstrom of activity with all those cell doors banging open and shut, but imagine the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, enacted in slow motion and with sadness.
Yes, Reach the Rock is very sad. Halfway through the film we learn that Sergeant Quinn blames Robin for the drowning death of his nephew. Even later, we learn that Robin has been moping and pining for four years because a rich local girl (Brooke Langton) dated him in high school but dropped him when she went to college—except of course for summers, when she comes home and resumes their sexual relationship, which seems sporting of her. “Time stopped for you about four years ago,” somebody tells Robin, or maybe it is everyone who tells Robin that.
There is a subplot. When we first see Ernie the dim-witted deputy, he is drinking in a parked squad car with a local woman named Donna (Karen Sillas). He’s about to make a move when he gets the call to check out the alarm at the hardware store. Throughout the entire movie, Ernie and Donna try to get horizontal, and are repeatedly interrupted. This is a running gag, or, in this movie, a walking gag. Donna grows frustrated, and wanders the deserted night streets in her nightgown—forlorn, neglected, and in heat. At one point, when Ernie arrives for yet another rendezvous, she warns him, “This is your last chance,” but one senses that with Donna there are as many last chances as with Publisher’s Clearing House.
All of the elements of the plot at long last fall into place, including an old tattoo that explains an earlier parable. Comes the dawn, and we are left with questions which only a policeman could answer. (Spoiler Warning—read no further if you intend to see the film.)
Attention, officers! If a perpetrator has a three-page arrest record, and during one night, angry at being dumped by an old girlfriend, he breaks a store window, breaks out of a jail cell, steals a police car, uses a police shotgun to shoot out another window, locks an officer out of the police station, locks two officers into cells, starts a fire, and tries to frame an officer for the crimes, would you, in the morning, release the kid and tell him to go home because “her old man has insurance”? Just wondering.
Renaissance Man
(Directed by Penny Marshall; starring Danny DeVito, Gregory Hines; 1993)
Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters. Watching it, I felt embarrassed for the actors, who are asked to inhabit scenes so contrived and artificial that no possible skill could bring them to life. It’s hard to believe that this is the work of Penny Marshall, whose films like Big and A League of Their Own seemed filled with a breezy confidence.
The movie stars Danny DeVito as a divorced and broke Detroit advertising man who is fired from his job. He applies for unemployment compensation, and his counselor eventually finds him a job—as a civilian instructor on a nearby army base. His assignment is to take a classroom of eight difficult cases and somehow increase their “basic comprehension”—of everything, I guess. This is made more difficult by DeVito’s own lack of any basic comprehension of how the army works.
The class seems impossible to teach, and besides, he’s no teacher. In desperation he begins to talk about Shakespeare, and the students, desperate for action, encourage him to say more. Eventually the class turns into a seminar on Hamlet, and we are subjected once again to the dishonest fiction that academic knowledge can somehow be gained by enthusiasm and osmosis. Why, the students’ mastery of the subject is so profound that in no time they’ve put together a classroom rap musical based on Shakespeare’s story! (It helps that one of the students is played by Marky Mark.)