Fire – No way out, the review: a derivative blockbuster from Russia

Fire review – No way out, Russian film where a group of brave firefighters is on a mission in a forest devastated by flames.

A team of firefighters and rescuers from the Russian Forest Protection Agency are on a mission to put out a gigantic fire that is ravaging the Krasnoyarsk forest in Siberia. The fire has now taken the upper hand, destroying hundreds and hundreds of hectares of vegetation and even homes and small villages are in grave danger, especially if they are located near wooded areas.

As we tell you in the review of Fire – No way out, the team led by the expert Andrey Pavlovich Sokolov is going to the place in the hope of saving as many people as possible; among the new recruits there is also the young boyfriend of the commander’s daughter and this will open up unprecedented dynamics between the two. But there are many other stories that will intertwine in the course of increasingly tumultuous events, with the flames threatening to sweep away forever not only homes and memories, but also human lives.

The ways of the show

A great success with the public at home, this production flying the Russian flag follows the logic of the autochthonous blockbuster which in the last decade has increasingly undertaken the choice of copy/paste, taking the Hollywood blockbusters old-fashioned and adapting them to the relevant context.
Fire – No way out is no exception and indeed declares it openly in an exchange, where the team of firefighters – rigorously dressed in red with special overalls just before leaving for the mission – is compared, by the young new entry, to the team of drillers/astronauts led by Bruce Willis in Armageddon – Final Judgment (1998). This time the destination is not the asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, but an immense wooded area where the fury of the fire is consuming tree after tree and is close to seriously jeopardizing the human settlements that have the misfortune to find themselves here. on its passage.

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A predictable catastrophe

The narrative dynamics are also the same, starting with the relationship between father-in-law – future son-in-law in the making – in the wake of that between Willis and Ben Affleck, in fact – up to the highly predictable feats of courage and sacrifice that characterize the second half of the vision, when the genre action actually comes alive to make room for one pompous and tonitruant show, where everything is loaded to excess in search of an emotional rhetoric suitable for the general public. The pregnant woman who finds herself giving birth at the moment of greatest peril, the wedding party as a moment of calm before the storm, the phone calls in an attempt to reach loved ones, not to mention one of the most sculptural scenes that the recent trend of the disaster movie can remember: the pickup truck with the children on board that is lifted on a cable by the helicopter, with the aim of overlooking the burning forest, goes beyond the limits of involuntary ridicule.

No half measures

The two hours of viewing in the reiteration of stereotypes and clich?? found in the majority of homologous productions, but which here is resolved even more markedly than elsewhere due to caricatural characters, always ready to do the right thing and to give everything for the purpose of common salvation, between patriotic calls and socialist echoes to make peep here and there. Director Alexey Nuzhny, who stood out in 2012 for signing the short film Envelope starring Kevin Spacey, limits the damage of such an extremist script and makes the most of the good special effects and the archive sequences – some shots of the burning forests are from a real fire from a few years ago – being able to rely on a cast that is fortunately more self-deprecating than their respective characters.