Under Fire (2025)

This is one Ty and I did on the podcast, back in February on episode 250, and we both had a good time with it, so I figured I'd review it here and give it some more love. Considering it only has six critic reviews on IMDb, it looks like it could use all the love it can get.

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

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Aftermath (2024)

This is another one Ty from Comeuppance and I covered on the pod, episode 214 in the archives, which we paired with Armor, the Stallone Randall Scandal that we've already reviewed. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Aftermath has Dylan Sprouse as a returning combat veteran with PTSD who's back home in Massachusetts, where he and his sister (Megan Stott) are driving over the Tobin Bridge into Boston. As luck would have it, a woman (Dichen Lachman) in police custody is being transported across the bridge as well, as she's set to testify against a terrorist group composed of former special forces soldiers, led by Mason Gooding. Gooding and company aren't fans of her doing that, so they blow up half the bridge, blockade the other half, and are essentially holding everyone who was trying to cross at that moment hostage until they can get her. Will our fly-in-the-ointment hero Sprouse be able to take them all down?

This wasn't a bad deal. Sprouse is solid enough as the hero, Gooding is solid enough as the baddie, and there's some good action that gets you to the church on time. With all the other options out there to watch though, is that good enough? Our review will be only the eighth critic review on IMDb, which for a direct-to-Netflix film with a very limited theatrical release is pretty small. Even in the current ecosystem where critic reviews for direct-to-streaming DTV flicks isn't as high as it was five or six years ago, you'd think high teens or low twenties would be the minimum for this, not seven or eight. I think a big reason is the lack of names. Probably the biggest is Dichen Lachman with her run on Severance, but she's not a star and not on the cover, so the film isn't really selling her--and to be fair, they made Dylan Sprouse look like one of Paul Walker's younger brothers on that cover, so they're not even selling the film on him either. That's too bad though, because while this isn't exactly mind-blowing stuff, it's an entertaining pizza and beer movie, and in this world of myriad streaming options that isn't always a given, so if you get it, you should thank your lucky stars and take it and run.

Let's start with Dylan Sprouse as the lead. Usually in a circumstance like this, he's paired with an aging Hollywood star with a bigger name who they maybe got for one day of shooting, is in maybe two locations, and maybe spends 15% of his screentime not sitting, while Sprouse does all the heavy lifting. It was the classic Randall Scandal formula, while Bruce Willis is tied to a chair, any one of Jesse Metcalfe, Chad Michael Murray, Jamie King, or Ashley Greene are out there running around and punching Michael Sirow or whoever. For Sprouse though, that lack of the big name means fewer eyes and critic reviews find their way to his movie, but I also think it allows him the freedom to show us more of what he can do. Like if they had an Alec Baldwin grimacing and barking orders on a headset from a command center every 15-20 minutes, his face on the tin would get more streams, but I think it also would've weighed things down and taken some of the focus off of Sprouse. It's the modern streaming catch-22: the known face on the tin gets more interest, but the need to shoehorn that character in--played by an actor who's just trying to get it over with too--hurts the overall quality of the movie. Hopefully more of us in the review community will cover more of these to get the word out on them. Either way, Sprouse was solid here, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of what he can do in this space.

Ty and I missed that Mason Gooding is Cuba Gooding Jr.'s son, it took Rich at the DTV Digest to tell us. I don't know if that knowledge would've changed how we felt about his character though. Gooding did a great job playing him, but I think the thing older viewers like me are going to have to get used to is the take younger actors like Gooding will bring to roles like the big baddie in an action movie. This isn't the scenery-chewing fest you'd expect by an actor born in the 50s and 60s, or even someone like Chad Michael Murry in Fortress, who was born in 1981, and even though Murray brought a different energy from those older actors, you could still recognize what he was doing. And to that point, I don't know if we've seen anyone from Gooding's age cohort in a role like this, but I think that different energy added a unique element that helped elevate the film. I'm sure the filmmakers could've found a name actor born in the 60s to play this part and have them chew all the scenery, and we probably would've been okay with it, but I liked that they went this route, and it was good to see that Gooding was up to the task. 

All that said, Gooding's baddie did one of the worst things I could think of a baddie doing: blowing up the Tobin Bridge. Really, blowing up any bridge that sees a lot of traffic in a major city is a horrible thing to do. Not just the poor people trying to get home who were stuck and held hostage for however many hours, but the millions of people whose commutes will be negatively affected for months. I mean, what selfish bastard could do something so shitty? And the thing is, in American cities, public transit infrastructure has been so diminished that there's no way it could handle the added stress of so many more people using the system. Maybe that's the whole point of the movie though, to remind us that America has pivoted over the last 75 years or so to the least efficient mode of people movement, the car, at the detriment to the most efficient, high-speed rail, and while the idea of a terrorist group blowing up a bridge like this is an extreme example, our crumbling infrastructure means more bridges will be falling out of commission, and the fact that we've diminished our public transit systems to such a degree that driving is the only option for most Americans, these kinds of infrastructure concerns will be that much more burdensome, leading to billions of dollars in lost revenue, something we could prevent by spending a fraction of that to invest in better transit systems. So as much as the baddie is a jerk for doing this, I think the movie's message that we're too car dependent, even in a city like Boston that has a robust transit system by American standards, is a good one.

Finally, you're probably thinking "wasn't that the 'finally' paragraph?", which in many cases it would be, but I wanted to mention that Tanner Zagarino has a small part as one of Gooding's henchman. Yes, he's the son of DTVC Hall of Famer Frank Zagarino. The part is small, Sprouse takes him out early, then steals his mask to infiltrate the rest of the baddies. I looked at his IMDb bio, and the only other things he did of note are Pool Boy Nightmare, a Lifetime movie costarring Jessica Norris (of Santa's Summer House fame), which Jay Harangue did his magic on on his YouTube channel; and The Price We Pay, a heist thriller with Stephen Dorf and Emil Hirsch that, based on the IMDb description, is probably too much for me, but the guys at DTV Digest covered in episode 250 of their show. Anyway, none of that is what we at the DTVC want though, we need Airboss V with Tanner taking over his father's role, or hell, maybe a Project Shadowchaser reboot! Could we get Bryan Genesse's son to co-star? I think you're pickin' up what I'm puttin' down, aren'cha?

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Netflix, and it's available no matter your pricing tier. If you're looking for a 90-minute actioner to get you to the church on time, this will do it. Also check out the podcast episode Ty and I did on this one, 214 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26545708

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