Backdraft 2 (2018)
(On Cable TV, August 2019) Apparently, other people share my lasting liking for 1991’s Backdraft, to the point of seeing a next-generation sequel pop up almost thirty years later. Aimed at the direct-to-digital market, this Backdraft 2 doesn’t quite have the budget or the expertise to show us the fantastic fire effects of the original—all too often, we’re given some halfway-convincing CGI flames and explosion effects in carefully constrained sequences that never go as big or as ambitious as the original. I’d be exaggerating things if I claimed that the story makes up for it—Backdraft 2 tries to navigate between having its own story (focused on nothing less than international weapons smuggling) and tying itself to the original and it’s markedly weaker when it does nod at the first film, at one exception: Donald Sutherland’s two-scene role, in which he brings his devilish cackling insanity to the movie, looking terrible and enjoying it a lot. Meanwhile, our protagonist (a renegade arson inspector, meaning that he’s more of a Sherlockian action hero than a regular policeman) goes through the motions of an investigation according to the usual rules of film thrillers. There are odd issues of pacing with the film languishing on unimportant moments and rushing through others—with one of the returning characters unceremoniously taken out with no other reason than to provide motivation to the protagonist. Still, I rather enjoyed the call-backs to the first film’s (unrealistic) depiction of fire as a quasi-living creature, only understandable to those chosen few with the gift given to arsonists and arson investigators alike. Backdraft 2 isn’t that good of a movie, and it certainly doesn’t hold a candle to the first film, but on its own it’s a reasonably entertaining direct-to-digital film, at least if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing.