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RAPID FIRE
Author: Tim Huggins
Rapid Fire introduces filmgoers to the action-adventure hero of the 1990s ... Brandon Lee.
The son of the legendary Bruce Lee, Brandon Lee stars as Jake Lo, a college student with remarkable martial arts skills who witnesses a mob killing. When the witness protection program fails, he has to protect himself with his only weapons, his hands. One of the key elements of the story is Jake's memory of his father, who was killed before his eyes at Tienanmen Square.
"Jake is struggling to come to grips with his relationship with his father, which is something I've personally butted my head against many times," says Lee. "When Jake becomes allied with an older cop who represents a lot of things his father represented, it becomes an opportunity to work out some of the problems."
Also starring in the film are Powers Boothe as Lt Mace Ryan, a tough Chicago cop who lures Jake to Chicago; Nick Mancuso as Antonio Serrano, the heroin kingpin who targets Jake after Jake agrees to testify against him, and Raymond J. Barry as the corrupt FBI man who places Jake in danger.
Kate Hodge is Karla Withers, a Chicago policewoman who becomes romantically involved with Jake, and veteran stage actor Tzi Ma is "Rapid Fire's" ultimate villain, Kinman Tau, the Golden Triangle drug lord who considers murder a simple and necessary tool of his trade.
The story of "Rapid Fire," like the fictitious shipment of heroin it follows, begins in Thailand, where the villain Serrano's (Nick Mancuso) heroin empire originates, then travels to Los Angeles, where Jake Lo is introduced, and finally to Chicago, where Jake finds his life in serious jeopardy.
The five major martial arts fight scenes that propel the principal action required careful preparation. The choreography developed out of a collaboration between the director, writer Alan McElroy, stunt coordinator Jeff Imada and Brandon Lee. Imada and Lee have been working together since they first became friends at the Inosanto Academy of the martial arts in Marina Del Ray, California. Jeff was 15 years old; Brandon was 10.
"You consider what your opponents' fighting styles might be," Lee explains, stressing that "it just wouldn't make sense to have an Italian Mafioso throwing jump-back spin kicks.
But the FBI guys would have had hand-to-hand training, so we can justify having them drop into a cheesy classical fighting stance. And we can assume the Asians in the laundry scene have had a certain amount of martial arts training."
"We like to put a few gags in that are a little different, with a bit of humour," notes Imada. One of these was a tribute to a famous scene filmed by Brandon's father, Bruce Lee. The scene was constructed, Imada explains, "to keep Jake at the centre of the frame and bodies popping in and out, with no real reference to what's going on outside of the frame."
That scene plays a part in the film's most complicated fight sequence, which involved both interior and exterior filming, sets in two different cities, dozens of stuntmen, dozens of guns being fired, and the destruction of a restaurant owned by Mafia boss Serrano.
In "Rapid Fire's" final fight sequence, Lee chases actor Tzi Ma over a building roof, then, after a 20ft jump onto a train station, across the tracks themselves.
The fight on the tracks is distinctive, says Ma, "because my character can't compete with Jake's strength and speed, so he tries to outsmart him. Usually Jake's opponents are younger, faster, stronger, but in that particular fight, we went for strategic fighting rather than flash fighting."
The attention to the intricacies of violent conflict lends credibility to a story which, says producer Robert Lawrence, "is a kind of classic 'man swept up in forces beyond his control and just trying to survive".
Even though it's a hard-driving action film, the theme is how somebody goes from being an isolated loner to someone who ultimately joins the human community."
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