UNARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS
Storyline
In this explosive martial arts action adventure a student is pursued by smugglers, mobsters and crooked federal agents after he witnesses a murder by a Mafia kingpin. Determined to survive, he singlehandedly takes on Chicago's warring drug lords with the assistance of a renegade cop and his beautiful partner.
Rapid Fire turns out to be a decent little action movie and Brandon Lee's best film. It's not a big budget Hollywood picture full of stars, but it delivers the goods. It has good martial arts style fights involving Brandon Lee because I think Powers Boothe would seriously injure himself if he tried a roundhouse kick. When Brandon fights the last bad guy in the laundry you can definitely see some Wing Chun moves. The gunfights are pretty good too, with a couple of juicy red sprays. Although some ideas and moves were "borrowed" from Jackie Chan's kick ass movie, Police Story. If you've seen Police Story you will recognize the motorbike driving through the glass scene and the fight with involving a clothes rack.
Big dollops of sex and violence are what make a really good action film. Rapid Fire combines those two main cinematic ingredients. Although there are not great dollops of sex, there some shots of nudity such as a chick modeling for an art class. You get to see boobies there and in the sex scene between Brandon Lee and Kate Hodge. But let's face it folks, this is about the hits and not the tits.
Brandon Lee's panache for the martial arts, inherited from his late father, Bruce Lee, shines through in the fast-paced action fights. Although The Crow is a much more lavishly mounted film, the dark, brooding storyline and cinematography do not allow the ass-kicking kung-fu talents of Brandon Lee to shine through, this film does.
Okay maybe this will sell you on the film, and we lazily copied it off the back of the tape box. "Rapid Fire's most complicated fight sequence involved sets in two different cities, dozens of stuntmen and the destruction of a restaurant. Because filmmakers couldn't destroy the Chicago restaurant they were using, an exact replica of it was built on a California soundstage, then wired to explode from walls, windows and even the bottles that lined the bar."
The Action Faction would recommend this film to any hardcore action fan.
Rating:
/ 10
