Movies are a strange thing. Not only are there all the people who star in a film to consider but there are the dozens of others who operate the cameras, set up the lights, and do the other maintenance required to create a movie. When you also factor in the people who work for the studios, the marketing types, and even the folks working at the movie theaters you have hundreds of people working to bring you a single movie. In spite of all that effort some movies are so bland and boring that you forget what they were about almost immediately after you watch them. A good example of this type of "filler film" is Firepower.

Made back in 1979 but looking like it could have been made ten years earlier, Firepower stars James Coburn as Jerry Fanon, an ex-operative who is pressed back into service in order to bring Carl Stegner [George Touliatos], a reclusive billionare, to justice. Teaming up with his old partner Catlett [O.J. Simpson], Fanon heads down to the Stegner's island fortress in order to smoke him out. Also along for the ride Adele Tasca [Sophia Loren], a woman who has a past involving, conveniantly enough, both Fanon and Stegner.

The preceding makes it sound like the movie has a fairly simple plot and it does. That, however, doesn't keep the creators of Firepower from making it as complicated and overdone as possible. Staging an international kidnapping is tricky, complicated business and the film makers make sure the audience doesn't miss a second of procedure. For instance, at the start of the movie Eli Wallach shows up as a gangster with the unfortunate name of Sal Hyman. Or maybe he was just a crooked business man. It doesn't matter any way since he drops out of the movie about a third of the way in without any real resolution to his character or even any explanation for what he was doing in the film in the first place. Later the characters go hang out with Dominic Carbone, who is played by Billy Barty. Again, those scenes go nowhere although I felt the movie would have been much more interesting if it had focused on Barty's character instead of the main plot. When James Coburn plays his own look-alike for no other reason than it allows him to ham it up with himself via split-screen you know you're watching a movie that has far too much going on for it's own good.

Since Firepower is dedicated to introducing as many pointless plot threads and characters as possible the characters spend a lot of time chatting. They hang out in airplane hangers and chat, they alternate between hotel rooms to chat, they sail around the harbor, suck down booze and chat, they hang out with Billy Barty and chat and, my personal favorite, they put a blue filter over the camera lens and pretend to chat at night. There's a fine line between complex and busy and it's a line that Firepower leaps over with as much force as possible. Once everyone except the audience knows what's going on they finally get down to the business of heroically kidnapping a guy.

In spite of all their efforts, planning and conversations Fanon and company end up deciding the best way to solve their problems is to shoot their way to victory. I suspect the action in Firepower was supposed to be it's main selling point. With bits like having Catlett scramble through a burning mansion [okay, a couple of sets with strategically placed gas fires], Fanon driving a bulldozer through a house seemingly for the fun of it and plenty of hired goons who are more than happy to give their lives to protect a reclusive billionare there is ample if a sporadic amount of chaos to go around. None of it, however, is so amazingly good or so amazingly bad that it's worth recommending.

Firepower may have actors you've actually heard of and plenty of core elements that go into forming other, better films but otherwise there's very little in the film to recommend. So why am I discussing it? Many movies are released every year, most of which are immediately forgotten. There's a brief burst of buzz when they are released to the theaters and another when they make it to video but after that the movie will live on or die based on it's own strength. If Firepower has any fans out there who are interested in keeping the memory and spirit of the film alive I have yet to meet them. The only reason I know about Firepower is that I stumbled across a screening of it on television once and then later stumbled across a copy of it at a video store. Now that I've rented and returned Firepower it will go back to it's place in the store, eventually to be joined by the the current crop of mediocre action movies that will also soon be forgotten, all of which will molder on the shelves alongside Firepower, which will be a far more poetic ending for Firepower than the movie itself offers. The problem isn't that they aren't making movies like Firepower anymore, it's that they are.

I managed to make it through the entire review without making an O.J. Simpson joke. If you want to congratulate me on a rare show of restraint drop me a line at gleep9@hotmail.com. If you feel like you're equiped with sufficient firepower head on back to either the Third Movie or Main page.