Firestorm (1998) 20th Century Fox/Action RT: 89 minutes Rated R (violence, language) Director: Dean Semler Screenplay: Chris Soth Music: J. Peter Robinson Cinematography: Stephen F. Windon Release date: January 9, 1998 (US) Cast: Howie Long, Scott Glenn, William Forsythe, Suzy Amis, Christianne Hirt, Garwin Sanford, Sebastian Spence, Michael Greyeyes, Barry Pepper, Vladimir Kulich, Tom McBeath, Benjamin Ratner, Jonathan Young, Terry Kelly, Jon Cuthbert. Box Office: $8.1M (US)
Rating: *
Action movies are, by nature, preposterous. Not much of what happens is even remotely believable. People cannot outrun fires or explosions nor do they emerge from such with only scratches and bruises. The stunts action heroes perform in pursuit of their quarry would cause real people grievous bodily harm or death. Bad guys don’t miss as much when they fire guns in real life as they do in action flicks. The list goes on and on. Most movies in the genre are silly; others are just stupid. Some, like Die Hard and Dirty Harry, are classics. Some, like Firestorm, are just bad.
Here’s the funny thing about the 1998 Howie Long starrer. It falls into that category of bad action movies that still manage to be entertaining despite their many flaws and deficiencies. I saw it at an advance screening in January ’98 and didn’t like it. I didn’t expect to like it any better when I sat down to rewatch it more than a quarter of a century later. I was looking to write a bad review and deliberately chose a movie I disliked. How much did I NOT like Firestorm? I didn’t care about not obtaining a poster after the screening. I didn’t even try. What did I not like about it? A lot of things. For one thing, it’s highly derivative of other better action movies. It’s a mash-up of ideas lifted from Backdraft, Cliffhanger and Shoot to Kill encased in a disaster movie scenario. The set-up is extremely contrived. There’s no way the villain could predict his plan would work, too many variables. As for the lead actor, Long is so wooden I’m surprised he didn’t catch fire along with the trees in the Wyoming forest where the action takes place.
Long plays Jesse Graves, a smokejumper (i.e. a firefighter who parachutes into forest fires) who finds himself the only one who can stop an escaped convict and his cohorts from making it to freedom with $37 million in stolen money. A psychotic criminal named Randall Shaye (Forsythe, Stone Cold) stages his own escape by having somebody on the outside set a forest fire so that inmates from a nearby penitentiary will be brought in to assist the firefighters. Shaye disguises himself as his cellmate (who he murders) so he will be assigned to the crew. At the right time, he and four other prisoners will overpower the guards, don the firefighters’ uniforms and go to where he hid the proceeds from a train robbery four years earlier. There are two things he didn’t count on: (1) a second forest fire heading their way and (2) Graves.
Along the way, Shaye and his guys take an attractive ornithologist, Jennifer (Amis, Blown Away), hostage. Ah, something else Shaye didn’t count on. This particular ornithologist has military training as a result of being from a family of Marines. She’s a bad ass. While Graves tries to stop Shaye, who’s killing off his collaborators as they make a run for freedom, his former boss Wynt Perkins (Glenn, Backdraft) tries to save him. That is, after he rescues a group of prisoners, guards and firefighters locked inside the prison bus by Shaye to roast to death in the approaching fire. This scene contains one of the dumbest questions ever asked in an action movie. Wynt asks if anybody knows how to hot-wire a bus. Uh, look where you are, dude. You’re among criminals; the answer is obviously…. ALL OF THEM!
I hate to admit it but I actually found myself enjoying Firestorm in all its glorious stupidity. Moronic doesn’t even begin to describe the plot and all its holes not to mention a twist even the most clueless moviegoer will see coming from a mile away. I’ll give you a wee hint, the actor in question played a very similar role in another movie involving firefighters. Due to the high predictability factor, this does NOT qualify as a spoiler.
Firestorm moves along at a decent clip until the final 20 minutes when it starts to lose steam. This is when it should really cook. You have two big fires heading towards each other which will suck up all the oxygen upon colliding. This is called a “firestorm” (hence the title). You have bunch of characters in the thick of the disaster. You have the square-jawed hero fighting the crazed villain. The problem is that the makers rush the ending. It’s like they reached a point where somebody said, “Okay, let’s wrap this thing up as quickly as possible.” They even forget to tie up a few loose ends like the fate of Shaye’s lawyer, the guy who set everything in motion.
Long isn’t the first professional athlete to fail as a lead actor. He joins such non-esteemed company as Joe Namath (C.C. & Company), Dennis Rodman (Double Team), Shaquille O’Neal (Kazaam) and Hulk Hogan (everything except Rocky III). His stiff performance is a big part of what makes Firestorm so enjoyably bad. He doesn’t even get off any quotable lines or clever catchphrases. He has a cool fight with a hulking Russian bad guy. He throws a fire axe right into another bad guy’s chest. He flirts with Jennifer (I think, I couldn’t really tell). Glenn adds a note of class to the proceedings even if he does phone it in. Forsythe hams it up but it isn’t anything we haven’t already seen from this actor.
The stunts and effects in Firestorm are decent without being all that spectacular. The sight of fire does become tiring after a while. The opening scene of Long rescuing a cute little girl and her cute little dog from a burning cabin (yes, the dog lives!) is competently done. BUT it goes to what I said earlier about outrunning raging fires. Anymore, I have to chuckle when I see stuff like that.
Here’s the deal. Firestorm is dumb, ridiculous and predictable. It also has a reasonable amount of action and thrills. It’s directed by Dean Semler whose only directorial credit is the 1998 direct-to-cable Steven Seagal actioner The Patriot (that one is a stinker!). Based on the evidence before us, it’s obvious why he’s never been tapped to helm another movie. Firestorm is truly a bad movie but it’s also kind of/sort of fun. It’s badly made yet strangely watchable. I give it one star based on its artistic merits but recommend it as a curiosity. Bad movie junkies will have a blast; it’ll leave others cold.
