Go long with Howie Long. Fight fire with fire this Friday in
Firestorm.
After Savoy Pictures (A
Bronx Tale, Serial Mom, No Escape, Tales From the Hood, Dr. Jekyll and Ms.
Hyde, White Man’s Burden) went belly up 20th Century Fox picked up
the Firestorm script and decided to
roll the dice by casting ex-football player Howie Long as the lead. Originally it was supposed to be bigger in
scale and budget, hell even Sly Stallone signed on. But everything got pared down and the end
result is pretty interesting and pretty delightful. Well, as delightful as a raging firestorm can
be anyway.
Let’s start with the obvious. Howie Long got the part based on his
performance in Broken Arrow where he
played John Travolta’s number two (I guess it’s also possible that the folks at
Fox got a hold of his deleted scene from ThatThing You Do! and liked him in that too).
He does do a decent job in that movie and I can see the temptation to
put him in more roles. The man was only
a couple of years out from football so he still looked fucking huge and could
move well. His presence was strong yet
his attitude was reserved. And with that
big glowing smile on his face you’ve got someone you can work with. In BrokenArrow he was ideal for the role because he plays someone that you think is
a good guy but then turns out to be a traitor.
Finding an actor that can play both sides willingly and convincingly
isn’t the easiest thing and I think he pulled it off.
So now Long needed to step up his game big time because this
film was hinging a good deal on his performance. And you know, he does just fine. Not great or particularly memorable but
completely serviceable. He’s got the
size of Schwarzenegger, the friendly spirit of Stallone and…well…that’s
it. He’s missing something. While Long’s greatest strength is that he can
handle the action scenes very well, his biggest weakness is that he has no
charisma. There’s nothing that sets him
apart from the pack. Van Damme and
Seagal had martial arts, Bruce Willis embodied the everyman with his build and
approach, Stallone was the all American fighter (having a notable face and
voice helped a great deal) and Schwarzenegger was the (memorable in every
aspect) mountain of muscles. Long had
nothing to offer that these guys couldn’t do better. He would need to have either serious acting
chops or work with one of the best production teams shooing one of the best
action scripts ever to compete with his contemporaries. It’s not even like he was the first football
player to cross over into movies so he couldn’t use that novelty to his
advantage either. Just a couple of years
earlier in 1991 The Boz did a bang up job in the little known but fuckin’
awesome Stone Cold. Now that’s how you stand out. Get yourself a wacky haircut and a giant pet
lizard.
It’s sort of a shame because like I said, Long isn’t bad
here. He totally pulls off the role of a
guy who fights wildfires in Wyoming but then also has to go toe to toe with
some scumbags. He just lacks any kind of
personality. So in that sense he’s
better relegated to number two roles (not that those parts don’t or shouldn’t
require a cool persona, but it’s not as important as your two main leads). Although for him it didn’t matter. Firestorm
didn’t catch and Long only did a couple more roles before calling it quits on
acting altogether.
Ok, enough about Howie Long.
Let’s move on to William Forsythe (Out
for Justice, The Substitute) who plays our villain. This sonuvabitch specializes in crazy and
while this may be more on the tame side for him he still puts on a good show. It’s a little weird actually because either
he or the filmmakers couldn’t decide if this character was supposed to be more
of an intellectual or a brute. Not that
those two things can’t coincide (Darth
Vader and Javier Bardem in No Country
for Old Men are some examples) but those qualities didn’t blend in this
case. Forsythe will be saying some
cunning remark with the smuggest goddamn look on his face one moment and then be
all over you with a gun and a grimace the next.
He’s always fun but this performance was a little uneven. It could’ve been a lot worse though. We did get one of the all time greats as the
bad guy after all.
In terms of fire, there’s a lot of it. The people who put this together certainly delivered
on that. You really feel the heat
too. I saw it when it was like seven
degrees outside or some shit and it was getting me a little hot just looking at
the screen. It all looks great too with
what seems like mostly real fire. It’s
only at the very end where I noticed they whipped out the primitive and horrible
looking CGI fire. Unfortunately, even
though there’s plenty of fire it wasn’t used in the most effective way I
think. It’s more of an overarching
threat in the background. Only one
person dies by fire and, while that death is pretty gnarly, there should’ve
been more burns and uses of fire as a weapon.
You could’ve easily written fire out of the script and not a whole lot
would’ve been affected.
The action sequences aren’t bad though and are nicely
varied. The picture opens with a big
scene involving rescuing a little girl from a cabin in the blazing woods. It’s a classic setup and execution with Long
going against orders and running in to fetch the girl. Of course it’s not that easy and
complications arise but by the end Long is walking in slow motion out of the
smoke carrying that little fucking girl unharmed. It’s a great scene that makes a very
impressionable start to the film.
My favorite part is probably the fight between Long and one
of Forsythe’s henchmen (Vladimir Kulich (The13th Warrior)). They go
hand to hand in an outpost and they actually look kinda evenly matched (Kulich
is gigantic). They use various items to
battle with including axes and a canoe.
The chase scene that follows with Long on motorcycle and the
bad guys in a truck is also nicely handled. The part where Long, while on his bike, starts
a chainsaw by throwing it down towards the camera while holding on to the
starter rope (I looked it up, that’s what it’s really called) so that it
yo-yo’s back up is phenomenal. It
reminds me of Schwarzenegger cocking his shotgun one handed while riding a
Harley in T2. To top it off Long then tosses that
motherfucker over his shoulder right into the bad guy’s windshield. You know what? I take it back, that’s my favorite thing in
this movie. That quick little part is
genius.
That last bit in particular must’ve been leftover from the
original script which was written by Graham Yost. He had recently penned Speed and Broken Arrow so
this guy was on a fuckin’ roll. However
the script ended up being changed so much that some other dude (who essentially
hasn’t done anything else) got credit.
But there are some remnants left behind that I don’t think are too
difficult to pick out. Aside from the
part I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the ticking clock with some sort of
constant threat is a trademark of Yost’s other two well known scripts. In Speed
the bus can’t go below fifty miles per hour, in Broken Arrow Hale has to stop Deakins before he escapes with a
nuclear bomb, in Firestorm they have
to make it out of the woods before the firestorm engulfs them.
Also, the angle with Scott Glenn (Backdraft, Training Day) having something to do with the villain’s
plot must’ve been more prominent and fleshed out. The way they rewrote it and cut it down it ends
up not making any sense. They reduced it
to such a small sub-plot that it should’ve been done away with all together.
And teaming up the hero with a strong female counterpart is
another trademark of Yost. Jack Traven
has Annie, Hale has Terry and Howie Long has Suzy Amis (Blown Away) (I don’t think we ever learn her name in the movie). She plays an ornithologist that gets caught up
in the action. She’s also an
ex-marine…maybe…it’s a little unclear but that’s the excuse they give as to why
she can trade places with someone on a motorcycle going full speed and pop a
knee back into place ‘n shit. The
problem is they tell us about this marine business too late. She does her most ridiculous shit a couple of
scenes in a row and then after all that exhibition we finally find out. They really shouldn’t have gone that long.
Dean Semler’s only other directorial work is the dull Seagal
picture The Patriot. From what I remember Firestorm is the better one.
But Semler is really a cinematographer and holy shit has he worked on a
ton of fucking mainstream films. Some
highlights are The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2), Dances with Wolves and Waterworld. And he’s still doing nothing but huge films,
he just did Maleficent. It’s weird though because he didn’t do his
own cinematography on Firestorm. Instead it was another insane dude, Stephen
F. Windon (Deep Blue Sea, Fast Five, Fast
& Furious 6). But anyway, Semler
does just fine. There isn’t anything
remarkable or very amateurish about the directing. It’s solid.
So all in all this is a fun one. It’s also fascinating to think about. Like the fact that this was supposed to be a
Stallone vehicle because I could totally see him starring in something like
this. That’s probably because Cliffhanger is so similar (Cliffhanger: a group of bad guys
traverse mountain tops to find suitcases of money only to be thwarted by an
expert on the terrain; Firestorm: a
group of bad guys make a prison break to find a hidden cache of money and
traverse through the woods only to be thwarted by an expert on the terrain). And I think you can tell that the original
script must’ve been a good deal better. It
would’ve been cool to get the big budget version but this intimate one ain’t
bad.
With that said I guess I would only recommend it to big
action fans. It’s sort of a curiosity in
the genre because of who it stars, the story behind it and even who directed it. The thing is there are better action
curiosities to check out first like Stone
Cold and Gymkata.