Hellfire - Old Man Rambo

Hellfire, the latest from DTV stalwart Isaac Florentine (most famous for Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing), is sure to please fans of the genre. It’s basically old man Rambo with a western twist. The cast was the selling point for me with Stephen Lang as the nameless savior, Dolph Lundgren as the corrupt sheriff, and Harvey Keitel as the drug lord holding the entire town hostage. The film handles all the basics just fine, and there are a few deviations and quirks that make it stand out.

For the basics, the plot sets up the perfect simple story of good guys and bad guys. It’s 1988, and the small town of Rondo, Texas, is being terrorized by a drug lord and his son. He uses the local brewery as a front for drug smuggling and forces the entire town to help. If they fight back or try to inform on Keitel, they get hurt or even killed. Bar owners Lena (Scottie Thompson) and her father, Owen (Chris Mullinax), are especially threatened since Keitel’s son has taken a liking to Lena, a widow who lost her husband in Vietnam. The film’s cold open ends with her praying to him, asking for an angel to be sent.

That angel is Stephen Lang, a Vietnam vet drifter just making his way through town. As you can imagine, he gets told immediately and constantly that outsiders aren’t welcome, and he needs to move along. If you can believe it, he doesn’t move along, and violence ensues.

From a pure action/revenge standpoint, Hellfire is fine. It moves along quickly, and some of the fights are decent (though the sound effects, especially for punches, are distractingly bad). There’s a lot of basic bad guy shit going in this, but things ramp up to unexpected brutality in the final third. It makes the film stand out, for sure. 

The cast is still the strong point here, and Lang does a fine job as an elder Rambo. He isn’t too severe about it, but he still effortlessly conveys that he can beat anyone’s ass at any given moment. And it was nice to see him in a non-blue role. Keitel can play a dirtbag in his sleep, so he’s fine. And a toned down villain is kind of nice since it wouldn’t make sense for a mad dog-type to get away with the shit he’s doing. But Dolph Lundgren stands out for me. It’s clear that they only had him for a few days as his role is woefully small. His conflicted sheriff was the most interesting character, and Lundgren pulled it off when I was initially worried about a Swede playing a Texas sheriff. I think the film would have been much more compelling had they saved some money by going with a smaller name for Keitel’s part, allowing Lundgren to work longer and beef up the role.

Most people aren’t coming to Hellfire for conflicted villains, though. If you just want to see an old man take on drug smugglers, then you’ll have a good time with this. This isn’t going to blow anyone away, but there’s something to be said for films like this. It reminded me of the kind of movies Burt Reynolds used to make, like Malone. Nothing groundbreaking, just some decent action with a compelling plot. Hellfire has that and a little more.

Random Thoughts (SPOILERS)

My biggest issue with stories like this usually boils down to “Why do the bad guys keep sparing the people against them?” Hellfire doesn’t have that problem. Once it’s clear Lang is going to be a problem, they try to kill him. When the town rallies around him, every one of them is slaughtered, and Lang only gets away because they thought he was already dead, and he sneaks out while they’re getting rid of the bodies. This movie gets dark fast at the end. It truly shocked me when the first townsperson was shot.

A real issue I had was with the time setting of the film. Lang just looks too old to be a Vietnam vet in 1988. I get that they wanted to avoid cell phones and whatnot, and they did a decent job of keeping things period accurate (with the exception of Lundgren’s cop car), but it took me out of the movie trying to do the age math. If we’re being generous and calling Lang 60 (he’s 73, but was probably 70 when it filmed [more on that later]), then that puts him at least in his mid-40s during Vietnam. It’s not unheard of, but it’s rare enough that I wish they just had a line of dialogue to explain it. 

The film also presents the possibility that Lang truly is an angel or something because he literally disappears as he walks away during the credits. If that’s the case, then he’s a shitty angel as he got the whole town killed. Ignoring the disappearing aspect, it is revealed that he was under Keitel’s command in Vietnam, and Keitel’s orders led to the death of a lot of soldiers. So was Lang always just on a revenge mission, and the angel shit was just a coincidence. If so, once again, it’s pretty shitty that he got the whole town killed (except for Lena) for a personal vendetta. Just show up and shoot Keitel, dude. No need to Count of Monte Cristo this shit and fuck up everybody.

Lundgren’s character surprised me when he basically decided enough was enough. Normally, his character would’ve been treated as a mini-villain to be taken care of before the main fight. But he gains a conscience, which immediately earns him some bullets to the chest. It’s realistic, but it left me wanting more from him. 

For whatever reason, this has been shelved for over three years. I don’t understand why, though the eight or nine production company logo sequences at the beginning certainly made sense once I found that out. I figured the three big names alone could have sold this sight unseen. But I suppose names don’t mean as much these days.

Cop Land - "You Blew It!"

This was covered by The Rewatchables podcast a couple weeks back because of Ray Liotta’s passing. I watched it then, but I’m just now getting around to writing my full article.

Cop Land is one of those movies that I thought I should love but always thought was okay. But I keep returning to it, thinking, “This will be the time that it clicks, and I love it.” But it never happens. Instead, it’s just a movie I like. I blame expectations.

Cop Land isn’t the first movie to be hyped for awards and then be a disappointment, but it is the first time I noticed this happening with a film. This came out when I was just starting to appreciate movies and pay attention to industry news and whatnot. So when this movie went into production with this insane cast (Stallone, Keitel, Liotta, De Niro, etc.), the Oscar buzz was immediate. Then the movie came out, was decently received but was shutout of the awards season (except, according to IMDb, for Stallone winning Best Actor at the Stockholm Film Festival, and the film being nominated [though not winning] Best Foreign Film at the Turkish Film Critics Association Awards [The Ice Storm won]). 

Despite my disappointment, I still like this movie. And once you adjust your expectations and stop thinking this is going to be Goodfellas 2, it ends up being even better. Stallone was, and still is, the standout in the film. It was like his last attempt to be a serious actor before retreating back into his franchises and mediocre action movies. He gives a great understated and unexpected performance. 

Aside from that, I’ve developed a love for angry corrupt cop movies lately. So I’m just happy seeing drunk and/or high guys with mustaches yelling and punching each other. 

Those were my complete thoughts about this film, but when I was looking it up on IMDb I realized that I had watched the theatrical cut on HBO Max, even though I owned the director’s cut on DVD. So being the idiot completionist that I am, I immediately watched it again to compare. Before I get into that, I just want to point out that I have to be the only dipshit to watch Cop Land twice in a 24 hour period since it was originally edited.

I’m not one to do an extensive comparison of theatrical and director’s cuts, especially since another website already does that. Instead, I like to focus on tonal shifts or specific scenes that change the movie in a meaningful way.

One of the things that always left me disappointed with Cop Land was the story. I found a lot of it hard to follow. Yes, almost every cop was corrupt, but what exactly was their corruption? The director’s cut (or maybe just watching it twice so close together) makes it a bit more clear that mob money helped Keitel set up the titular Cop Land in Jersey, and he keeps killing any cops that get into trouble with internal affairs out of fear that they will rat him out. 

Even not completely understanding the story the first time around, I still found one moment completely baffling. Stallone goes to Keitel and tells him that he knows Rappaport is alive, and he wants everyone to go into the city together to clear things up. Why the fuck would he tell Keitel this when Keitel has clearly made up his mind about he does things? In the director’s cut, this scene occurs after Stallone has found Rappaport rather than before. He also explains that he’s telling Keitel about this because he feels like he owes it to him. I still think that’s pretty stupid, but I can accept it since Keitel is responsible for Stallone having his job. In the theatrical cut, this scene ends abruptly, but in the director’s cut Stallone is given a hero moment when he stands up to Keitel and tells him that he doesn’t like what’s happened to their city. Keitel eventually agrees with him and agrees to go in, though the music makes it clear that he’s not going to honor this.

The changes in this scene make the movie quite a bit better, and it reinstates a moment that Stallone’s character desperately needed. It’s not that much longer than the original cut, so I don’t understand why it ever happened in the theatrical cut as it did. 

If the movie then ended exactly the way the theatrical cut did after this change, then this would be a truly great director’s cut. But for some reason, James Mangold (the writer and director I have failed to identify until now…oh well) decided to end the movie with the newscast footage rather than with Stallone back on the job. This baffled me. That ending is important for multiple reasons.

First, it solidifies that this is Stallone’s movie. It was about him waking up to the corruption around him and doing something about it. The ending moment shows him staring at New York City. He’s done this throughout the movie with sadness because he’s never been able to join the force because of his hearing. When he looks at the city at the end, it’s not with regret. Instead, he seems happy for the first time to be on this side of the river. To cut that out and end with newscast audio makes no sense. In the words of De Niro: “You blew it!”

The director’s cut is still a bit better, it’s just that losing the original ending is tough. Because of that, this isn’t one of those clear cut cases of recommending the director’s cut over the theatrical. Most people don’t have this on DVD, so you’ll probably end up watching this on a streaming service if you ever watch it again, and that’s fine because that last Stallone moment kind of makes up for any earlier confusion.

Overall, no cut of this film was going to make it the classic I wanted it to be. But watching it in today’s TV landscape made me realize something: this would have been an amazing TV show. The story could breathe a bit more, and there could have been a season or two of all the shit that happened before the events of this movie, which could have been the final season. Unfortunately, this movie was made right before TV became so much more respectable. This is one of those rare moments in which I truly wish this will get remade as a TV show.

Random Thoughts

After finishing We Own This City (the HBO series no one is watching but you’ve been told is amazing), I still had a hankering for corrupt cop drama. Thankfully, The Rewatchables decided to cover Cop Land because of Ray Liotta’s passing. 

Fucking mustaches, drinking, yelling, throwing punches, everybody pissed off, cheating. I don’t know why, but sometimes I like watching these movies about complete trainwrecks at the end of their ropes.

With a cast like this at this time, it was impossible for this movie to meet expectations. It’s a good movie, but people were expecting a classic.

Nice touch to have the pinball machine tell Stallone he has “no authority.”

Robert Patrick is the most corrupt looking cop I have ever seen.

Peter Berg definitely looks like a dude who would cheat on his wife.

Oh shit, I forgot I own the director’s cut of this. Now I have to watch this twice.

“It’s like you’re the sheriff of Cop Land.” 

(Pitch Meeting executive guy voice): “That’s the name of the movie!”

Damn, Superboy, I know you're hiding out, but you can eat something other than canned soup. There were about two dozen cans in that hideout!

Why is Liotta always wearing an oversized untucked shirt in this? Is that just how cokeheads dressed in the '90s?