Walter Hill’s dumbbell box office bomb “rock & roll fable” set in a studio backlot fantasy land where the look of the 1950s never died, but most of the music is pure 1980s synthesizer cocaine rock provided by the likes of Jim Steinman and Dan Hartman. Further adding to the film’s patchwork vision is that the story is a Western at heart. It’s got a gang of bad guys who kidnap a girl singer. It’s got a loner anti-hero (Michael Paré). It’s got lawless saloons (neon-lit bars, in this case). And it’s got your classic mano-a-mano confrontation in the middle of the street. It’s called Streets of Fire because something blows up about every ten minutes.
Walter Hill says that he made a list of everything that he liked in movies when he was a teenager and stuck ’em all together for this film whether it made sense or not. And it mostly doesn’t, but that’s okay. The big problem here is that the characters are all dull as rice cakes. Willem Dafoe sure does look cool as the vampire-faced leader of the villainous motorcycle gang, but Walter Hill forgets to give us even one little scene that shows why he’s supposed to be so scary. Dafoe just sort of turns up from time to time, glares, and then goes away until the film’s climactic hammer fight. That’s it. He kidnaps Diane Lane, but the movie never explains WHY. In fact, you may never see a LESS SCARED kidnapping victim in the movies than Diane Lane here. She seems more annoyed than anything else.
Watching this, I could relate.