Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

Fire with Fire Blu-ray Movie Review

Smoke and mirrors.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 19, 2012

Tales of star-crossed lovers fighting forces (at least partially) beyond their control are as old as—well, Adam and Eve. But the term “star-crossed lovers” appropriately evokes William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (the play where the phrase originated, after all), and it’s Romeo and Juliet that obviously plays an important subtextual part in Fire With Fire, a little remembered 1986 film featuring a very young Virginia Madsen (Sideways) as a modern day Juliet and an equally callow Craig Sheffer (A River Runs Through It) as her erstwhile Romeo. The Shakespeare allusions don’t end there, though, as the two young lovers actually “meet cute” when Sheffer’s character of Joe literally stumbles across Madsen’s character of Lisa as Lisa poses as Hamlet’s Ophelia in a forested river. How many doomed Shakespearean sets of lovers do we need to “get” that this is a film about mismatched paramours who will struggle against significant odd to try to achieve that ineffable happy ending. Given the finales of both Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, things might not seem especially promising, but when it’s understood this is an eighties “date movie”, things brighten up, at least a little bit. This is a movie that probably appealed largely to dewy eyed females back in the day, many of whom probably dragged their boyfriends or husbands along with them to experience the heart wrenching adventures of two young lovers who seem to have the whole world out to keep them apart.

Joe is a young kid who’s been in trouble for driving a car through a window and has been sent to a juvenile detention facility that is kind of like a teenage version of the chain gang camp in Cool Hand Luke, down to the almost cartoonishly evil camp boss (Jon Polito). Meanwhile, a nearby all girl convent school (who sited that nun run organization next to an all male prison camp?) is busy instilling righteousness into its just slightly frisky young women, including Lisa. (It should be noted that Designing Women's Jean Smart is on hand as a kindly nun, one perhaps related to the Nurse role in Romeo and Juliet.) Is there any doubt that these two disparate worlds are about to collide, and true love will blossom between the most unlikely of subjects?

Well, right there is one of the first problems with Fire With Fire: this is a film ostensibly about young (quite possibly doomed) love, and yet the actual romantic sparks don’t start flying until around the one hour mark of a film that is a little over an hour and a half long to begin with. Instead we get interminable establishing sequences which could have been dealt with in quick summations instead get a slow, lugubrious treatment that really hampers the film’s momentum. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand these characters. We have the studly young man, obviously a basically “good kid” who’s made some bad decisions. We have the romantically yearning young woman, trying to break free of the bonds imposed upon her by society. And we have the ridiculously over the top prison boss, initially out to prove to Jake who’s in charge, a tendency that soon ensnares Lisa as well.

The second 45 minutes or so of Fire With Fire at least ups the energy level significantly, as Joe and Lisa finally manage some secret assignations, but the film also goes completely over the cliff (no pun intended, considering a major set piece of the movie) with an absolutely hyperbolic emotional content that is actually kind of hard not to laugh at. When the viciously evil jail boss corners Joe and Lisa (repeatedly), he’s so over the top one almost expects to see white foam emanating from his mouth. This is not a film of subtle nuances, to say the very least.

The film lurches from ridiculously overdramatic moment to overdramatic moment, with Madsen and Sheffer trying their best to overcome some really risible dialogue and a downright silly plot that finds the pair sneaking around a cemetery in order to consummate their forbidden love (talk about romantic). Once the film gets the lovers away from both the convent school and the prison camp, things only devolve further. My favorite moment from this sequence has Madsen traipsing about in the woods to the sounds of a sylvan wonderland, when suddenly a sheriff’s helicopter roars into view from behind a slight rise, with absolutely no warning build up of sound. Maybe it was one of these super secret stealth helicopters.

Still, it’s fantastic to see Virginia Madsen in one of her early roles, and she brings a nice balance of innocence and spunk to her portrayal. Sheffer is fine as Joe, though as politically incorrect as it may be to mention it, he is the bearer of one of the weirdest looking monobrows in the history of film, one that is almost impossible not to stare at when he’s on screen. The two young actors have a decent amount of chemistry together, but the film is just so cliché ridden that they never are really able to break free of the stereotypes, down to the slow motion, candlelit lovemaking scene. By the time the two are doing their own version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in the cliff jumping scene alluded to earlier, the film has gotten so patently silly that few will probably care if things end up tragically or not.

Fire with Fire Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Fire With Fire is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Despite being another Paramount catalog release of the same general vintage of the recently reviewed Firstborn, the results here are at least nominally better than in the Michael Apted – Teri Garr film. While contrast isn't especially strong here, and colors tend toward the same garishness they do in Firstborn, the overall image is minimally crisper and sharper, with good to excellent fine detail in close-ups. A lot of the midrange shots still exhibit general softness and some of the dark scenes lack sufficient shadow detail. Grain is natural, not nearly as overwhelming at it was at times in Firstborn.

Fire with Fire Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Fire With Fire's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix is awash in 1980s synth-pop from the likes of Prince and other big haired acts of the day. That's the best part of this soundtrack, which also has some pretty treacly moments in Howard Shore's dramatic underscore. Otherwise, while the film has its share of screaming and yelling, there's nothing else here other than simple dialogue scenes, which the mono track handles quite capably. Fidelity is very good, with fine reproduction across all frequency ranges.

Fire with Fire Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This is a typical Olive Films release with no supplemental content.

Fire with Fire Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fire With Fire could have used a little more Shakespeare and a little less Aaron Spelling, to horribly mix creative types. This silly melodrama has two charismatic leads, but the film is just a mess of ludicrous situations and cartoonish supporting characters. I'm sure the film will probably bring back fond memories to women who were probably younger girls on dates when they first saw it, but for those not awash in rose-colored glasses memories, Fire With Fire is a pretty sordid train wreck. On the plus side, Madsen's hair looks incredible.