Rapid Fire
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Brandon Lee, Kate Hodge, Nick Mancuso, Powers Boothe, Raymond J. BarryBrand: Fox
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 4.0; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 4.0; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-05-21
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of Rapid Fire
Movie Review: Now THIS Is What a Martial Arts Movie Should Be!
Summary: 5 Stars
To the strains of sitar music, a lithe figure dressed in white moves in slow motion against a black background, his graceful movements funneling seamlessly into violence. One by one, opponents present themselves. One by one they're smashed aside. Slowly we segue into a close-up of an intense, handsome young man's face, and we see the words BRANDON LEE. Thus begins Rapid Fire. If you wanted to build a martial arts movie superstar - and obviously that was the goal - you couldn't have done it better than with that sequence.
Serious martial artists were aware of Brandon Lee's existence since his birth. They also knew he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps as an actor. All across America - probably the world - untold thousands of people rooted for him. Brandon paid his dues in a few ultra-low-budget projects before co-starring with Dolph Lundgren in Showdown In Little Tokyo. Not a great film, but Brandon was good in it, and that got him Rapid Fire, his first lead role and, as it turned out, an absolute starmaker. (On the strength of Rapid Fire, Brandon got The Crow - and we all know how that turned out.)
It's fascinating to compare Brandon as a martial artist in Rapid Fire to his dad. Bruce Lee started out a highly skilled martial artist with real-world capabilities who became an actor. Brandon by contrast always wanted to be an actor, thus his martial arts training was geared toward flashy techniques that would look good on-screen. What the hell, they DID look great. Brandon, though obviously a fine athlete, didn't have his father's explosive speed and power. But then, who does?
So many martial arts movies are dumb chock-socky. By contrast Rapid Fire is well-written and directed, and decently acted, especially by Brandon, Powers Boothe as Detective Lieutenant Mace Ryan (God, you gotta love that name), and Nick Mancuso in a cheerfully over-the-top performance as a crazed mob boss. On top of that, Rapid Fire fulfills the greatest requirement of a martial arts flick: the sense, as you watch the actors in motion on the screen, of "Oh my God, I didn't know human beings could DO that." This is not a love of violence per se, but rather a love of watching hard, competent people push the human body's design parameters in violent conflict.
The fights in Rapid Fire were choreographed by Brandon and Jeff Imada. The standout scene is a fight to the death between Brandon and Al Leong (probably best known as Endo, the torturer from Lethal Weapon, and Uli, the chocolate eating terrorist from Die Hard). All the fight scenes are top-notch, though several stunts, like using a motorcycle to drive a bad guy through a row of glass display cases, and employing a clothing rack to trip an opponent during a fight, were lifted from Jackie Chan's Police Story. However (a) in all honesty I have to say that both these moments were done better in Rapid Fire, (b) in 1992 in the US only a handful of hardcore kung fu movie buffs had ever seen a Jackie Chan film; even those few recognizing the influence probably smiled at the homage rather than considering it a rip-off.
There are other smile-making moments in Rapid Fire, like comments on how Jake Lo's (Brandon's) deceased father was such a great martial artist; Brandon's summary clocking of a bad guy dramatically swinging nunchukas, his dad's most famous weapon (obviously this fellow had watched way too many Bruce Lee movies); Brandon using as a disguise an outfit incorporating the same sort of Coke bottle glasses his dad used for the same purpose in The Chinese Connection; and I laughed out loud at the scene where Jake explodes all over a treacherous FBI agent, beating him like a red-headed stepchild, leading Mace Ryan to comment, "Jake, why don't you take those fists of fury of yours outside?" That little in-joke requires no explanation to any Bruce Lee fan.
So for Brandon a handful of crappy roles led to Showdown In Little Tokyo (so-so) begat Rapid Fire (a truly, deeply enjoyable action adventure flick) and then The Crow (an absolute masterpiece). And that's all we're ever going to have of Brandon Lee.
Summary of Rapid Fire
RAPID FIRE - DVD MovieBrandon Lee?s penultimate picture isn?t much on paper--a dour college kid, bitter over his activist father?s death in Tiananmen Square, is targeted by a Chicago mobster after witnessing a gangland killing and reluctantly joins forces with brooding, obsessed cop Powers Boothe--but then who was watching this for the story? Consider this his screen test for the superior The Crow. Lee bites off bad dialogue with surly sneers, swaggers through scenes with the confidence of a movie veteran, and moves... well, his moves are the real reason to see the film. Nick Mancuso has a good time as the weasely mobster getting sloppy in his desperation, and Powers plays the father figure with less conviction than sheer tenacity, but Brandon Lee is the star-in-the-making of this production. This, unfortunately, is no star vehicle, but it provides enough bone-crunching, butt-kicking martial arts action for any action junkie. --Sean Axmaker
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