Under Fire has Mason Gooding as an under cover DEA agent working with border patrol agent Odette Annable--whom he's also dating--to take down a big Mexican drug kingpin. He's deep undercover, and thinks Dylan Sprouse is a mid-level dealer that's his in with the kingpin. What he doesn't know is Sprouse is also undercover, only he's an FBI agent, and he thinks Gooding is his in with the kingpin. It all comes to a head when they're about to make a big deal, and as they go for the bust, they each reveal who they are. That's probably enough to open a buddy cop series, which would've been a fun time, but a sniper hiding in the hills has other plans. He's taking people out left and right, leaving our heroes pinned down behind a couple parked cars. Now they have to leave their animosity behind and work together to get out of this. But the question is, who sold them out to the sniper in the first place?
As I said above, this was a pretty good time. Gooding and Sprouse have great chemistry, and they work well in this kind of dynamic. From there, I think the film does a good enough job of keeping a plot like this from becoming stale, which is something another film with a similar paradigm, Take Cover, struggled with. Part of that was Sprouse and Gooding, but it was also the creative ways the story led our characters to try new things to get out of their situation, and either succeed, or fail but at least advance the proceedings so we didn't feel like we were spinning our wheels. Then at the end we get some great Dylan Sprouse Fu when he confronts the baddie. If you're looking for some fun newer action, and you have Hulu, this is a good way to spend 90 minutes.
We last saw both Gooding and Sprouse in Aftermath, which also wasn't bad, but it felt like this allowed them to bring more personality to their roles, which they were more than able to do. The problem unfortunately is we have the current DTV ecosystem that's all about loading the movie with older actors that once had a big name so they can be splashed on the tin, and there isn't as much room for younger names like theirs to have opportunities like this; or they get their opportunity, but because it doesn't have one of those older names attached with a 5-page sit-down role, it doesn't get the eyes on it it should, and something that's a lot of fun like this ends up with only six critic reviews. My solution to this is a buddy cop movie starring Sprouse and Gooding, with Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin, John Malkovich, and Morgan Freeman as baddies that our heroes have to overcome. Then you can splash those guys on the cover, give them each their five pages of script with only one filming location, but then the movie gets 20 or 30 critic reviews and the world gets to see what Gooding and Sprouse can do. It could even be called Geezer Teaser as a play on the trend. It looks like they both have other stuff in the can, which is good, but hopefully soon they'll be teamed up again, maybe in a sequel to this.
This employs another recent DTV trend, the one location movie. It's like DTV producers and studios are looking for scripts that either mostly take place in one location, or can be turned into that. I get it, from a cost standpoint it makes sense, but from a movie standpoint it usually requires a lot of padding, often in the form of flashbacks or non-linear storytelling to mitigate the fact that the bulk of the film is only happening in one place. While this isn't a new thing, in the past I think it was more commonly done by reusing sets, so at least the film felt like we weren't in the same location the whole time, but the budget was saved by not needing to recreate these places from scratch, they could just reuse sets that were used in another bigger budget film--or maybe a few different DTV films. This new trend feels more cynical, similar to the other modern DTV movie trends, so it's nice to have a film like this that mitigates the challenges of shooting in one location in a more creative, organic way, which removes a lot of that cynicism. I don't know that we'll see more like this, but I hope we do, because I can't imagine the one location trend is going away anytime soon.
The first major plot point of this movie reveals an issue with federal policing in the US, and that is that we have too many agencies that overlap, wasting taxpayer money. Why do we have an FBI, DEA, ATF, and DHS? Why not make them all departments under the FBI? I think we know the answer: they're all created to have their own budgets, so they can all use taxpayer money to buy back military surplus and engage in their own no-bid contracts with companies that pay off or are invested in by various politicians. Also Trump was able to break ICE off and make them his own secret police much more easily due to the fact that they were already under DHS, itself a broken off government entity. And we see here, we'd have no movie if they all worked under one organization, Gooding and Sprouse would have one boss to report to that would handle drug trafficking and they'd know each other--like how if we had universal healthcare in the US, all the former thieves who need to do one last job to pay for a relative's surgery wouldn't have that reason anymore. The dysfunctionality baked into our government which is there to enrich the lives of billionaires and the politicians they pay off has been giving screenwriters material for decades. Would you call that making lemonade out of lemons? And why do we need to make lemonade out of lemons? Lemons are great in beverages, great to squeeze onto salads, I have a great recipe for linguine and asparagus that involves lemons--so many great things you can do with lemons besides making lemonade, why is that an expression?
Finally, getting back to the lack of critic reviews on IMDb, when you look at the page, there are also only 11 photos, of which 10 are various cover images, so no one really put any effort into marketing this. I want to say, what are you doing Voltage Pictures, or whoever else are producing and distributing these films, why aren't you reaching out to us in the movie blogging world and having us review your new releases, but then I think of the volume of screener emails I get, and how much time I have to do them, and realize maybe this still would've sat until now even if someone reached out to me directly to review it. Maybe, but maybe not, and I can think of five or six other sites off the top of my head that also would've covered this too, and with its availability on Hulu, we would've given this a more robust presence on there and IMDb. We can be here to champion these movies for you, otherwise you're left to the whims of the IMDb user reviews, of which you'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yes, some of my older reviews aren't the nicest either, but over time I think I've been fairer and more understanding of the time and work that goes into making any movie. All it takes is a simple email, and we're happy to help. We love these movies and want to see them succeed.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this as part of your Hulu subscription, which I think is a good deal. It's a fun time, one of the better movies Ty and I have covered in our two-movie episodes of the podcast. Speaking of which, the episode we covered this on was number 250 in the archives.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32212611
And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
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