Fire with Fire (2012)

Fire with Fire arrives as a 2012 direct-to-video action thriller, which is a polite way of saying nobody ever asked it to carry the weight of a theatrical release, and it carries nothing of the sort. Josh Duhamel plays a Long Beach firefighter who witnesses a convenience store murder at the hands of a neo-Nazi crime boss, testifies, enters witness protection, and then decides the program is too slow. The film knows exactly what it is: a revenge picture assembled from spare parts. Vincent D'Onofrio chews the scenery as the Aryan Brotherhood kingpin. Bruce Willis appears, collects a check, and departs.

The ensemble is more varied than the genre usually bothers with. Rosario Dawson plays Deputy Marshal Talia Durham with professional competence, and she is the one who puts the villain down in the end, a small inversion of the expected arrangement that the screenplay treats as ordinary business. 50 Cent and James Lesure fill supporting roles. The film never pauses to remark on any of this, which is to its credit as entertainment and to its neutrality as a cultural document. Race enters the story only through the Aryan Brotherhood antagonist and a line about Eastside Crips territory, texture borrowed from the crime shelf and deployed as shorthand. No thesis attaches to it.

What remains is a firefighter who never once mentions a warming planet, a criminal enterprise motivated by real estate instead of greed as a system, and a finale that resolves everything through arson and a gunshot. The film lectures no one. It burns a building down and rolls credits. For that restraint, it earns a small nod.