A Very Complete Review Of The Film Streets Of Fire

Nov 19, 2010 by Adrian Bryant

Walter Hill directed Streets of Fire as an attempt at making what he believed would’ve been the absolute best movie ever when he was a teen. He wrote the script by simply writing a checklist of things he loved as a kid, and making sure that the script included everything on the list. We’d put it on any top movie downloads list of great eighties flicks.

The movie follows Tom Cody, a soldier who’s been discharged and returns to his old hometown when Ellen Aim, his old sweetheart, and a pop music sensation, is kidnapped by Raven, the leader of the local biker gang. The film works on the level of fantasy, mixing fifties and eighties aesthetics into a new kind of setting. The environment the characters inhabit is surreal and dreamlike, and the cinematography is beautiful, with rainy streets and neon signs dominating the screen.

The movie is really defined by the music, again, blending fifties and eighties styles. You’ll hear these great old fashioned fifties rock tunes with a layer of synth and aggressive, eighties style vocals. It really invents its own style of pop and Rock and Roll, even having led to the hit single, I Can Dream About You.

The story itself is pretty stock action film stuff, but this time it’s done with such incredible style that it feels fresh and all new. The girlfriend is kidnapped, the hero comes home to save her. We’ve seen this story hundreds of times before, but this time, it’s elevated to a sort of modern day, Rock and Roll fairy tale.

Walter Hill has remained one of the great directors of the last few decades, but rarely gets the respect he really deserves as such. He continues to knock it out of the park with more recent films like Undisputed, and earns acclaim with each new film, but is rarely mentioned alongside Scorsese or Brian dePalma, which is truly a shame, as he’s certainly one of the most entertaining directors alive.

Besides the rock and roll, the film also has a score written by blues legend Ry Cooder. The earthy, bluesy feel of his slide guitar offers a contrast to the glossy feel of the rest of the soundtrack, and drives home the “down to earthness” of Tom Cody, the character most frequently accompanied by Cooder’s guitar score.

If you haven’t seen The Warriors yet, Streets of Fire makes an excellent double feature with that film, as both take place in an elevated reality, a sort of fantasy world, with The Warriors taking it in a more gritty direction while Streets of Fire takes the concept into a more glitzy, glamorous direction. The two fantasy worlds feel akin to one another.

There was to be a pair of sequels to the film, but, sadly, they never panned out, as Streets of Fire didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. Today, the film has become a major cult classic, but it wasn’t easy to market twenty odd years ago. Check it out and see why it’s one of the all time coolest action flicks.

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