Fire with Fire Blu-ray Review
Smoke and mirrors.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 19, 2012
Tales of star-crossed lovers fighting forces (at least partially) beyond their control are as old as—well, Adam and Eve. But
the term "star-crossed lovers" appropriately evokes William Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet (the play where the
phrase originated, after all), and it's
Romeo and Juliet that obviously plays an important subtextual part in
Fire
With Fire, a little remembered 1986 film featuring a very young Virginia Madsen (
Sideways) as a modern day Juliet and an equally callow
Craig Sheffer (
A River
Runs Through It) as her erstwhile Romeo. The Shakespeare allusions don't end there, though, as the two young
lovers actually "meet cute" when Sheffer's character of Joe literally stumbles across Madsen's character of Lisa as Lisa
poses as
Hamlet's Ophelia in a forested river. How many doomed Shakespearean sets of lovers do we need to
"get" that this is a film about mismatched paramours who will struggle against significant odd to try to achieve that
ineffable happy ending. Given the finales of both
Romeo and Juliet and
Hamlet, things might not seem
especially promising, but when it's understood this is an eighties "date movie", things brighten up, at least a little bit. This
is a movie that probably appealed largely to dewy eyed females back in the day, many of whom probably dragged their
boyfriends or husbands along with them to experience the heart wrenching adventures of two young lovers who seem to
have the whole world out to keep them apart.
Joe is a young kid who's been in trouble for driving a car through a window and has been sent to a juvenile detention
facility that is kind of like a teenage version of the chain gang camp in
Cool Hand Luke, down to the almost
cartoonishly evil camp boss (Jon Polito). Meanwhile, a nearby all girl convent school (who sited
that nun run
organization next to an all male prison camp?) is busy instilling righteousness into its just slightly frisky young women,
including Lisa. (It should be noted that
Designing Women's Jean Smart is on hand as a kindly nun, one perhaps
related to the Nurse role in
Romeo and Juliet.) Is there any doubt that these two disparate worlds are about to
collide, and true love will blossom
between the most unlikely of subjects?
Well, right there is one of the first problems with
Fire With Fire: this is a film ostensibly about young (quite
possibly doomed) love, and yet the actual romantic sparks don't start flying until around the one hour mark of a film that
is a little over an hour and a half long to begin with. Instead we get interminable establishing sequences which could
have been dealt with in quick summations instead get a slow, lugubrious treatment that really hampers the film's
momentum. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand these characters. We have the studly young man,
obviously a basically "good kid" who's made some bad decisions. We have the romantically yearning young woman,
trying to break free of the bonds imposed upon her by society. And we have the ridiculously over the top prison boss,
initially out to prove to Jake who's in charge, a tendency that soon ensnares Lisa as well.
The second 45 minutes or so of
Fire With Fire at least ups the energy level significantly, as Joe and Lisa finally
manage some secret assignations, but the film also goes completely over the cliff (no pun intended, considering a major
set piece of the movie) with an absolutely hyperbolic emotional content that is actually kind of hard not to laugh at.
When the viciously evil jail boss corners Joe and Lisa (repeatedly), he's
so over the top one almost expects to
see white foam emanating from his mouth. This is
not a film of subtle nuances, to say the very least.
The film lurches from ridiculously overdramatic moment to overdramatic moment, with Madsen and Sheffer trying their
best to overcome some really risible dialogue and a downright silly plot that finds the pair sneaking around a cemetery
in order to consummate their forbidden love (talk about
romantic). Once the film gets the lovers away from both
the convent school and the prison camp, things only devolve further. My favorite moment from this sequence has
Madsen traipsing about in the woods to the sounds of a sylvan wonderland, when suddenly a sheriff's helicopter roars
into view from behind a slight rise, with absolutely no warning build up of sound. Maybe it was one of these super
secret stealth helicopters.
Still, it's fantastic to see Virginia Madsen in one of her early roles, and she brings a nice balance of innocence and spunk
to her portrayal. Sheffer is fine as Joe, though as politically incorrect as it may be to mention it, he is the bearer of one
of the weirdest looking monobrows in the history of film, one that is almost impossible not to stare at when he's on
screen. The two young actors have a decent amount of chemistry together, but the film is just so cliché ridden that
they never are really able to break free of the stereotypes, down to the slow motion, candlelit lovemaking scene. By
the time the two are doing their own version of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in the cliff jumping scene
alluded to earlier, the film has gotten so patently silly that few will probably care if things end up tragically or not.
