August 21, 1992 | Brandon Lee carries on the family tradition of martial-arts mayhem and bodacious butt-kicking in Rapid Fire, the first starring vehicle for the handsome son of the late, great Bruce Lee.
As star vehicles go, this one goes pretty far, pretty fast, propelled by Dwight H. Little’s savvy direction, some fine work by a first-rate supporting cast and, most important, high-octane fight scenes that more than live up to the movie’s title. Lee himself is every bit as lithe and lethal as his dear old dad, and he has an arresting screen presence that serves him well here. He may not be a great actor yet, but, then again, this ain’t Shakespeare.
Lee plays Jake Lo, a Chinese-American college student whose father was killed during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Exactly what Jake’s father was doing in Beijing at the time he wound up on the wrong end of a tank is never made very clear. But it does help explain why Jake is an embittered loner at the start of Rapid Fire, and why he keeps to himself, even to the point of refusing to join campus protests against the repressive Beijing regime.
Like most action film protagonists, however, Jake quickly discovers that, if he won’t go looking for the trouble, then the scriptwriter (in this case,
Alan McElroy) will have trouble go looking for him. Our hero accidentally witnesses a mob killing, and gets caught in the crossfire between rival Chicago drug dealers.
Powers Boothe plays Mace Ryan — what a name! — a grizzled cop who offers to protect Jake from harm, if Jake will co-operate in convicting the bad guy (Nick Mancuso) that Ryan has been after for years.
Not surprisingly, it’s Jake who has to do most of the protecting, using his martial-arts expertise to get out of one scrape after another. Ryan is impressed, sort of, but he gets impatient whenever Jake wants to rough up someone Ryan needs to interrogate. ”Why don’t you take those fists of fury,” Ryan snarls at one point, “and wait outside?”
It’s a funny line, especially if you recognize it as a clever reference to one of Bruce Lee’s most popular movies. Wisely, though, the makers of Rapid Fire refrain from any other allusions to their star’s famous father.
Even the rough stuff in this movie has a different spin, a more turbo-charged kinesis, than similar scenes in the elder Lee’s chop-socky epics. Little, who warmed up for Rapid Fire by directing Steven Seagal in Marked for Death, takes an over-the-top approach to the punch-ups and shootouts that, in the movie’s best moments, recalls the intoxicating excess of recent Hong Kong action movies like John Woo’s The Killer.
To be sure, Little works in a slightly more realistic mode. But just slightly.
With his 24-hour stubble, heavily lidded eyes and rusty drain-pipe twang, not to mention a rumpled appearance that suggests an unmade bed that has somehow learned to walk, Powers Boothe provides both comic relief and moral authority as the obsessed Mace Ryan. And Nick Mancuso makes a dandy bad guy as Antonio Serrano, a hot-blooded mobster and do-it-yourself killer whose chief fear is that Jake will hit him in the face.
Kate Hodge makes a strong impression as mandatory love interest, Karla Withers, a Chicago cop who falls for Jake. She also packs a mean right hook, which greatly impresses her leading man. Who says there are no strong women’s roles in movies anymore?
