Into the Fire is a low-budget Canadian entry into the film noir
sub-genre of femme fatale thrillers that was so popular in the
40s and became even more popular in the 80s after being resurrected by
Body Heat. You know the drill: woman convinces a schmuck to kill her
husband for one or more of the following reasons:
(1) husband is a monster
(2) hot, steamy sex
(3) insurance money
It is often convenient for the conniving tootsie to choose a
drifter as her mark, in the model of The Postman Always Ring Twice,
and this film follows that template. Of course, the noir plot
invariably has a more going on beneath the surface, and the
patsy never seems to end up with either the dame or the dough. In this
case, it turns out that the woman and the husband are conspiring
together. I can tell you that much without spoiling the plot since
that detail is revealed about five minutes into the film.
And that's the biggest problem with the plot. The film would be far
more interesting if the audience were led to believe that things are
as they seem to the drifter, but the script tells too many of its
secrets too early.
The second major plot problem is that the premise is not maintained
consistently. The husband and wife are supposed to be having fake
fights, and the poor naive drifter is supposed to hear them and come
to the aid of the damsel in distress. In order to do that effectively,
the camera needed to stay on the drifter in the guest house, or
perhaps inside of his point of view, but it did not always do that.
It peeked inside the main house, where the husband and wife seemed to
be fighting for real. It may have been the director's intention to do
that as an additional element of mystery. He had already convinced us
that the pair were faking it, so maybe he wanted to
introduce the possibility that we misunderstood their relationship,
and that the wife's distress might be real. If that was the case, he failed,
because all of the other details demonstrate precisely how they are
plotting. For example, the wife sits at her make-up table and creates
fake bruises to show the sap. Because all of the other details add up
to "fake fights," the one look at an ostensibly real fight serves not
to deepen the mystery, but simply to add unnecessary confusion. Are we
seeing what really happened, or are we seeing what the drifter is
picturing?
You've probably guessed that the script has more secrets. Since
this genre is plot-driven, and since the conspiracy between the
husband and wife is revealed immediately, there has to be more going
on, and there is. First of all, you'll have to figure out exactly what
the couple is plotting. Second, you'll get some more surprises and
double-crosses at the
end of the film. In my opinion, those twists are not big enough or unexpected
enough to warrant an investment of even the mere 74 minutes it will take
you to watch this flimsy project. (IMDb says 88 minutes, so the DVD
may be expurgated.)
Sometimes the ending of a noir thriller is so clever and/or so
ironic way that we can overlook some flaws in the development stage,
but that doesn't happen here. The conclusion leaves a bad taste, and
layers in no delicious ironies, so the destination is no more
satisfying than the journey.
