Firing Line, The

"The Firing Line" is one of the worst films to be made in the recent past. Essentially it involves Reb Brown ("Space Mutiny") as an American military advisor on a mission to some fictitious South American country with a rebel problem. Made five years after the Iran-Contra affair, and at a time when the "Rambo" series was extremely popular and profitable, the film may have seemed reasonably topical (though still wretched) at the time: it is now merely another overacted action film.

The film starts by showing Reb Brown picking up Shannon Tweed in a bar. It turns out she's there on business selling "sports equipment" to hotels. (Ponder.) The two of them hit it off, but before long Brown is in trouble, and Tweed gets kidnapped in an attempt to find out information about Brown. The next 80 or so minutes are filled with implausible escapes, lots of gunfire, helicopters, explosions, and Reb Brown yelling "Move!" in the same manner he perfected in the infinitely better (though more comical) "Space Mutiny." Shannon Tweed's assets are largely squandered here, although she does turn in the best performance, and has plenty of time for a relatively immodest swim in the middle of a combat zone. Saying she gives the best performance here should not be confused with an endorsement, however: the scene where she stares slack-jawed at a dead body for several minutes in horror is overwrought enough with pathos to make any reasonable viewer's eyes roll back in their head. For sheer discomfort, watch carefully for the scene in which smarmy Reb and disinterested Shannon run off on a romantic interlude under a waterfall during hostilities.

The film has terrible production values, and makes the most of the limited footage they had of helicopters, things blowing up, and people falling down dead. Despite this, the film manages to be abjectly boring. Making it worse is the fact that the soundtrack sounds awful, there are large audio dropouts, and the sound effects frequently don't match the onscreen action. The music is equally annoying, consisting as it does of nearly constant trumpet and drum military fanfare refrains of low quality. After all the running, all the fighting, all the endlessly repeated helicopter footage, the obligatory stuntman on fire for some reason, and Reb Brown yelling "Move!" more times than I want to think about, the movie comes to an abrupt, unfulfilling train-wreck of an ending, which, while welcome, seemed like the filmmakers had simply run out of ideas and money.

"The Firing Line" is in every way a terrible movie. It has no redeeming qualities: it is too awful to be entertaining, and too boring to be funny. Just say no.