Author: BRWC

By Callum Nicholls.

Jackman’s past credits include X-Men First Class, G.I Joe: Retaliation, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Puss In Boots… Here Jackman lends his compositional talents to the no doubt soon to be multi oscar-nominated Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks.

In his score to the film Jackman effectively blends together atmospheric orchestral music with favours of African music (at least stereotypical western depictions of African music) in order to bring across the fact we are dealing with Somali pirates.

Films as tense and action filled as Captain Phillips can often suffer from over-scoring, something which I think Jackman and the producers have very effectively avoided here by appropriate amounts of silence vs musical accompaniment.

Although Jackman’s score provides an effective accompaniment to the film, it does lack enough variety and musical interest to stand alone as its own entity, something often characteristic of really great film scores.

3.5/5

Good lord. Sweet God almighty. Will you just look at that picture.

If a vampiric Willem Dafoe in PVC dungaroos surrounded by hellfire doesn’t affect you in some deeply personal way, then rent yourself to the army. You, my friend, are invincible.

Streets of Fire might just be the most masculine film I’ve ever seen. A quick list of some of the most overtly male things that happen in this blokesplosion:

– Bikers straight up steal women and drive off with them.

– A man hits other men over the head with a coat rack whilst wearing – successfully – a sleeveless denim shirt. With braces.

– Kissing. In the rain. Wet beards and crying women. Man-style.

– The only women are a tequila-slamming lesbian, who people repeatedly call “Butch”, and Diane Lane, a singer who opens the film by rocking a Meatloaf-equse hair ballad.

– Fire. And lots of it.

– A man punches out a woman. To protect her.

– Two dudes have a sword fight in the brooklyn streets. Only they’re not swords. They’re sledgehammers. Man-style.

After watching Streets of Fire I discovered that I’d grown a full beard. How manly is it? You just take another look at that picture of Willem Dafoe. To pull that off, your masculinity needs to be measurable in balls cubed. Willem Dafoe is 1,000 balls³.

Notice how I haven’t said that all this hyperthuggery is a good thing. It isn’t. In fact, Streets of Fire is a muscle-headed, hopelessly outdated, greasy fist of a film. It’s a deformed curio on a doctor’s shelf.

It describes itself as a taking place in ‘Another Time, Another Place…’ and it’s true. It’s hermetically sealed in a hybrid era, half 50s and half 80s. The huge hair, the leather clothes, the bizarre fusion of 50s diners and 80s scum bars, of 50s flannel shirts, and 80s neon. Everything is grimy, smoky or covered with John Travolta hair.

You punch what you can’t drink, shoot what you can’t punch and everything else is motorbikes. This is a film that has MEN in it, understand? They even cast Rick Moranis, the 80s go-to-guy for nebbish, just to stand next to the hero and emphasis exactly what a man isn’t.

The plot is the thinnest I’ve ever seen in a film, and that is no hyperbole. Diana Lane is kidnapped by Willem Dafoe and his fabulous band of biker tuffs. Diane’s ex, a marble block carved to look like Michael Paré, is called in to get her back. Explosions. He succeeds. Willem, annoyed challenges him to fight with hammers. Then they fight with hammers.

That’s it. Oh sure, people say mean things, punch out police officers and there are some tits at some point, but that’s all just window dressing. It’s short, it’s shallow, and entirely weightless. The dialogue’s so arch and the characters are so one-note it’s impossible for anything to matter.

Streets of Fire also has an ugly attitude towards women. If you’re not a damsel, a tough-as-nails lesbian or a stripper, you ain’t gettin’ screentime. This attitude strips away a lot of the film’s charm, turning cool into mean-spirited and badass into cruel.

The music’s great at least. From rock and roll tunes from an all-black harmony group that look like they’ve just finished playing the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance, tracks like “One Bad Stud” from bikers doing their best Big Joe Turner, all the way to Diane Lane’s Steinman-penned anthems, the soundtrack rocks and rocks hard.

Streets of Fire is a ridiculous, time-stamped pile of retro-tosh, but you might enjoy it from an archeologist’s perspective, or if you’re the sort of fellow who enjoys fighting naked. Either way, listen to your heart. 

-contains spoilers-

Drone Strike opens with a series of shots from a drone’s perspective. The last in the sequence depicts the shadow of the machine cast on the ground, slowly closing in on a small moving vehicle, like the shadow of an eagle hanging high above its prey. It’s a simple but effective piece of visual storytelling, at once prophetic, unsettling and indicative of the cold, clinical nature of UAVs.

The central conceit of the film is, in the words of its press release, “1 killing, 2 victims, 4000 miles” and the film hops back and forth between two protagonists throughout: a drone pilot in Lincolnshire and a labourer in the Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Both are family men, and the juxtaposition, and occasional parallels between the daily routines of each man is, again, a simple but effective device, the tension and dread slowly ratcheting up with the implicit presence of the unseen drone, hanging over everybody’s heads.

Inevitably, tragedy ensues. The wrong man is targeted and 4,000 miles away, an RAF pilot is left to contemplate the impact that the twitch of his thumb creates half the world away. It’s a beautifully-shot, beautifully-paced, beautifully-scored and compassionate piece of film-making. By choosing to focus so entirely on the mundane step-by-step of each protagonist’s day, the release of a hellfire missile as much a part of one Lincolnshire man’s day as dropping his son off at school or discussing bachelor party plans with his co-workers, the film captures just how cold and inhuman it is to remotely control such destruction.

However, the film is a little simplistic, truth be told. We don’t actually learn much about this complex issue, other than ‘drones can kill the wrong people’ and ‘Afghani people have families just like we do’, which would be a little patronising to assume that people do not already know. There no indication how drone targets are chosen, or the levels of intelligence required in doing so. This maintains the film’s sharp two-protagonist focus, but leaves it feeling a little shallow when it comes to exploring a complex issue.

Having its Lincolnshire protagonist reflect on what he’s done in the film’s closing moments is another misstep. His concern extends as far as a few thoughtful looks and a stiff drink. If the filmmaker’s wanted to actually address the protagonist’s thoughts on his own actions, more articulation is required than that to avoid seeming trite. Otherwise, having the character not harbour any concerns about his actions would have been much more powerful.

But these are relatively minor gripes for what is still an accomplished short. Scout Films have created a chilling, tense and effective little film, though one that would benefit from being a little less simple.