Firepower
(1994)
Director: Richard
Pepin
Cast: Gary Daniels, Chad McQueen, Jim Hellwig
PM Entertainment went through so many transformations
during its lifetime that it's hard to believe many of its films were
made by the same company when you compare them to each other. Take a
look at the company's history, starting back in the latter part of the
'80s when Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi first got together and founded
the company that was originally called City Lights. In those first few
years they made a name for themselves with ultra cheap movies like Mayhem,
The Newlydeads, and Dance Or Die. As bad and cheap as those
movies were, they must have made a profit, because in the first part of
the '90s they were not only still around, they were making somewhat
higher-budgeted movies like Chance,
The Art Of Dying,
and Street Crimes, which, while not all good, were a
definite improvement on what they made previously. (They had changed
their name to PM Entertainment at this point, possibly in a ploy to
distance themselves from those awful movies they made in their first
years.) A few years from that point, the budgets increased slightly
again, and they made movies like Cybertracker, Ice, and Direct Hit.
Then around 1996 PM hit its peak, raising significantly large budgets
for their movies which included Rage,
The Sweeper, and Executive Target. Not only were their
movies slickly made, they delivered the goods to B movie fans to a
degree that most B movie producers can dream of. Then there were their
last few years, with movies like Epicenter
and Hot Boyz; although there
was still merit to be found in their movies, they overall didn't match
what was made just a few years earlier.
Firepower is one of those third stage
movies, made just before PM Entertainment hit its peak, and it fits
pretty well with the product PM was making around this time. The plot:
In the far-away year of 1999, the local Los Angeles government created
a special area in the district called the "Zone Of Personal Freedom" in
an effort to ease the burden on local law enforcers' strained police
budgets. The Zone was created as a place where "victimless" crimes like
drug use, prostitution and gang vendettas could flourish without the
presence of the police getting into the way of these particular
criminals. For a while it worked, with crime rates in the rest of the
city going down significantly. But in the seven years since its
creation, it has become a lawless no mans land. Now referred to as the
"Hell Zone", underground gangs now rule the area, the most prominent
being the Hellriders. The gangs now inflict the whole city with their
crimes, then retreat back into the Hell Zone, where most of the police
are too fearful to follow. The movie focuses on two members of this
L.A.P.D. of the future, Sledge (Daniels, Rage)
and Braniff (McQueen, son of Steve McQueen). One night, cops from their
precinct capture one of the prominent members of the Hellriders, "The
Swordsman" (Hellwig, wrestling's The Ultimate Warrior), but an attack
on the precinct by the Hellriders frees The Swordman just minutes after
he's brought it. Sledge and Braniff track The Swordsman back to the
Hell Zone to a club called the Death Ring, run by a crime boss named
Drexel (Joseph Ruskin). It's a club where fighters bout on a regular
basis, and the martial-arts trained Sledge and Braniff decide to return
undercover as fighters to investigate the mysterious Drexel.
It's around this point in Firepower that
the movie's biggest problem starts revealing itself. Namely that after
this setup, there is really no more plot to be found in the hour or so
that follows. It's possible that screenwriter Michael January (behind
such PM Entertainment bombs like CIA II: Target Alexa
and To Be The Best) might disagree with this assessment.
He might point out the parts of the movie involving the AIDS epidemic,
thought eradicated five years earlier but experiencing a resurgence due
to the flood of a phoney vaccine on the market. Or he might point to
the part of the movie involving the strained marriage of Braniff and
his wife, with Braniff's wife tiring of her husband's lifestyle and
declaring such things as "What kind of example is this, [our son]
seeing his father beaten up and smelling like death!" Or the part of
the movie where Braniff "makes friends" with a woman (played by Alisha
Das, of the TV series Capitol) in the club. Or when the two
protagonists report back to their superior (played by George Murdock of
Battlestar Galactica) on their progress in their
investigation. But none of these plot details go anywhere; they are
forgotten about almost as soon as they are introduced, and are not
brought back anytime later in the movie to be resolved.
As you may have guessed, the plot is set up for an
excuse to see multiple fights at the Death Ring club. Avoiding any
effort to carry a plot though the movie to instead concentrate on
action isn't necessarily a bad thing. There have been movies before
(and since) that have had just a shred of plot mixed in with tons of
action that have turned out to be entertaining, such as the PM
Entertainment movie The Sweeper.
Unfortunately, the action found in Firepower isn't
enough to carry the movie, despite its ample amount. First, let me
backtrack a little and look at the action before Braniff and Sledge get
to the Death Ring. There's a boring car chase down a tunnel that
climaxes with a poorly edited montage of multi-angle shots of two cars
igniting a fireball and flipping over in the air. The jail break of the
Swordsman (who was earlier captured offscreen) is equally lame,
frequently cutting away from the action to characters elsewhere in the
area, and the impact of the shootings as wimpy as the sparks that come
out of the barrels of the guns. The Swordsman's fleeing to the Hell
Zone with the cops pursuing him is wrecked by director Pepin's
insistence on using the same two or three camera angles for 90% of the
chase, giving the scene a feeling that it's being restrained from doing
anything spectacular.
With the pre-Death Ring action being lame, it falls on
the fight sequences to save the movie, but unfortunately the movie
fails in this area as well. To Pepin's credit, he does seem to have
partially grasped the idea of how fights in Hong Kong action movies are
filmed, because for the large part he films the bodies of the characters so that all of their
bodies are visible in the frame. There is no cheating by using
extensive close-ups or quick edits. But that is all that's positive
that can be said about the fight sequences. For one thing, Pepin's
dependence on the same camera angles comes into play again. One of
these angles is a ringside seat, looking through the cage where the
participants are fighting inside; the mesh of the cage gets in the way
of seeing the fights clearly. Then there is the overhead angle, which
simply gets tiring to experience after being displayed so many times.
But even better camera angles would not save the fight sequences, since
they contain the same mistakes you usually find in low-budget action
movies; slow choreography, significant pauses between blows, and the
feeling that the participants are taking their time. Though both lead
actors may be skilled in martial arts, their talents are not showcased
here. That is, their fighting skills; both actors' acting skills are
easily dismissed, especially McQueen since he is not only made the
leader of the duo, he simply cannot display emotion. There is one good
performance in the movie, however, and that belongs to Art Camacho, who
also did the fight choreography. Though his choreography may be
questionable, his gives a charismatic performance in his brief role
that also shows a welcome sense of humor that the movie is otherwise
lacking. Aside from that, Firepower is a movie that
fizzles out quickly, and can only be considered a kind of warm-up for
what was to come from PM Entertainment.
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See also: Dance Or Die, Rage, The Sweeper
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