Man, where is the time going?
Welcome back for another round of 52 Pick-Up as I come to the close of the third month in this year long bid in the films that have been kicking around my 'I'll Get To It At Some Point' list. As March winds down, I come to a title that's been on the list for a while now.
And damn, do I regret sleeping on this one.
So, let's close out with Streets of Fire.
I'll start by saying it – this movie broke me in a way. As I've gotten older, there are certain phrases in describing films I have tried to strike from my vocabulary. This can be for any number of reasons from being overused or misused or just presented in bad faith.
One I have actively avoided for years is 'they don't make them like this anymore.' In this case, I will break and admit it – movies like Streets of Fire don't get made anymore. Or if they do, they certainly aren't at the level of weirdo ambition that Hill gets away with here on the back of his success from 48 Hours.
It's a mash-up of neon, biker gangs, a larger than life hero figure, a city that seems to be its own separate reality, all wrapped up in a rock and roll musical, populated with a murderer's row of a cast. It's the kind of style and genre mash-up that can be best represented by the famous multi-car pileup at the end of The Blues Brothers.
Let me be clear – this is a plus for me. For as strange as this combination is on paper, and I know it won't work for everyone, this one hit a spot for me I didn't know needed scratching.
For a description that gives this a little more of a 'what even is this' – the movie takes place in a city that seems equal parts throwback and slight future (the movie coins it 'another time, another place' not dissimilar from the semi-futuristic New York of Hill's earlier The Warriors.) The movie doesn't take too much time setting up the background before it plunges us into the action in the form of a concert for singer Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) who has her act interrupted care of a biker gang known as The Bombers. Their leader, Raven (Willem Dafoe with probably his most memorable villain look this side of Wild at Heart) takes an interest in Ellen and promptly kidnaps her. Immediately on the heels of this, witness Reva (Deborah van Valkenburgh) sends word to her brother, Tom Cody (Michael Pare.) Cody, a former soldier and Ellen's ex, rolls into town. After some initial reluctance, our hero has assembled a ragtag team involving himself, Ellen's manager (Rick Moranis), and a scrappy former army mechanic (Amy Madigan...excuse me, Oscar winner, Amy Madigan) to wander into the bad part of town and get Ellen back.
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I should pump the brakes for myself here before we go any further. There's a lot of things in this movie that work, and I will likely be hyping those up again before much longer, but I do want to be fair in some regards to this.
So, let's start with that cast. In a way, the cast is kind of a good macrocosm for this movie's pros and cons – its leads aren't bad, but I can't really say they're the reason to see this. Pare can hold his own in a scene, and I'm glad he's stayed working consistently, but you can see why he wasn't carrying a lot of the bigger movies of the decade. Likewise, Diane Lane is in a thankless spot for this movie as its designated damsel in distress. Like Pare, she's doing what she can with what she's given, but it's not really the big draw for this one.
Having said that, for as much as the leads are kind of underwhelming, the supporting cast makes up for them in spades. As the movie's de facto sidekick, Madigan takes a role that was written with someone completely different in mind (for starters, the character was originally written to be a man) and makes it fit so well you'd think she was always who they had in mind for it. Likewise, Dafoe, who doesn't get to say a whole lot in this, makes a mark on viewers just from a combination of his aesthetic and the weird menace he brings to Raven. Paxton, meanwhile, with only a few scenes, brings a presence to a character who could have been completely forgettable that makes it so I kind of wish we could have gotten more of Clyde the bartender. Granted, that was a charm that just came naturally to Paxton, but it still carries into this role.
Though if I'm giving anyone the big shout out here, it probably goes to Moranis, who takes a character that, on first glance, reads like it will be the sort of role he's played throughout his career, then turns it on its ear. Billy could have easily been another in the stable of endearing hapless characters Moranis got typecast into over his career, but instead, he is almost an antithesis of them – a man who knows he's not the hero of this story, but he also recognizes what value he does bring to this team, and he's not afraid to use it or stand up for his part of things. Watched in the shadow of a lot of his later work, this was a refreshing look and it's kind of a shame he didn't get more chances to play against type like this.
If there's one component that could be said to be the biggest MVP of this movie, it's the soundtrack. This isn't by accident – the movie literally introduces itself as a rock and roll fable, after all. Still, it is an area where, if the music had fumbled, it would have seriously hurt the film. Thankfully, it all works with its 'almost a musical' mix of several songs created for the movie's in-universe groups to perform. Two in particular are worth pointing out here. The first of these being easily the most famous song of the movie, Dan Hartman's I Can Dream About You, an earworm of the highest order that still makes regular play even if a lot of people may not realize it came from a movie. The other I have to give to the movie's closing number, Tonight Is What it Means To Be Young, one of two songs by Fire Inc, written by longtime Meatloaf collaborator Jim Steinman. As someone who grew up with Bat Out of Hell as an album in rotation, this end theme scratched a sweet spot for Steinman's signature bombastic power ballad style of songwriting, to the point I had a feeling it was him behind it before I looked up the music credits.
More than the kind of weak leads, if the movie can be said to have any particularly big weakness, it's the fact the script feels like an afterthought. As a complete product, the movie is INCREDIBLY heavy on vibes and atmosphere, and in that regard, it knows what it's doing. As such, the story mainly exists to move things from point A to point B and you don't really want to dwell on it too long, you just take its conceits as they are with the 'it's not quite our world' setting. The individual components are carried either on the cast, the music, the aesthetics, or the sheer audacity of some of the sequences (I'm still processing the fact this movie's climax involves a sledgehammer fight.)
In a weird way, the movie can almost read as the rambunctious, 1980s younger sibling to The Warriors. The set-up changes, but both are very stylized films to their decades about a ragtag team of heroes who wind up deep in the heart of an unforgiving city and have to fight their way out while being pursued by a leather gang led by a cold-blooded psychopath, all to the strains of a great soundtrack. Besides the era, the biggest difference between the two is that The Warriors finds a good balance of all of its different elements. Streets of Fire, in some ways, feels a bit more ambitious than The Warriors, but by comparison, it's also more of an uneven movie. The parts that work work VERY well, to the point where one can't really say they cover for the parts that don't work, but they also keep those parts from hurting the overall experience.
With that, we bid March adieu as 52 Pick-Up keeps rolling.
Kicking off April, we get a more recent title as I get an opportunity to follow up on the work of the man who directed my favorite movie of last year – which is my round about way of saying I'll be back next with Jafar Panahi's No Bears.
Till then.
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