July 19, 1996

As you can see I’m lagging behind on this summer retrospective, struggling to catch up. But it doesn’t feel like it while watching FLED, because this is the kind of mediocre movie they used to dump off in August. Perfectly competent, nothing more. A lesser work from two actors I was excited to see in anything back then. But also Stephen Baldwin.

It’s an action movie directed by Kevin Hooks, the child star turned TV director turned guy who did STRICTLY BUSINESS and PASSENGER 57, and it’s written by Preston A. Whitmore (THE WALKING DEAD [1995]). So we can at least give it credit as one of the ’90s movies by Black filmmakers that’s just allowed to be commercial and not under pressure to represent a culture or stop the violence and increase the peace or anything (even though it features Furious Styles himself).

When I saw the credit for producer Frank Mancuso Jr. (FRIDAY THE 13TH 2–7) and some flashy camera moves (cinematographer: Matthew F. Leonetti, HARD TO KILL, STRANGE DAYS) and then I heard composer Graeme Revell (THE CROW, THE CRAFT, MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE) playing DIE-HARD-type orchestral bombast over a hip hop beat on the opening credits, I wondered if maybe this was gonna be more pulpy fun than I remembered. Not really. But I can see, in retrospect, that they’re trying to do a bit of a John Woo thing with some flying through the air shooting and slow motion and vicious squibs. It was neither stylish or emotional enough to register at the time, but now it’s such a time capsule I guess I can appreciate that a little more, at least.

Luke Dodge (Baldwin in his followup to BIO-DOME) is the new guy on a chain gang, getting rape threats from one of the other convicts (Jon Huffman, writer of LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD). When a third inmate, Charles Piper (Laurence Fishburne between OTHELLO and EVENT HORIZON) stops Dodge from beating his bully to death with a shovel, they’re both blamed for the fight and chained together as punishment. Then they fight each other, and I guess that part is probly more exciting now than it was then, because we didn’t know that we were watching Morpheus vs. Barney Rubble.

The guards are clearly up to something no good, possibly corrupt, etc., but it gets superseded by the rape-threatener stealing a gun and opening fire on them. In the confusion Dodge and Piper run off into the wilderness together. Dodge is a guy who’s always mentioning movies that things remind him of, but maybe his knowledge doesn’t go back to the ‘50s, because he doesn’t mention THE DEFIANT ONES, like they will in GET ON THE BUS when it comes out the following October.

The being-chained-together doesn’t amount to all that much, though, and I like that even the interracial pairing doesn’t feel loaded. Race doesn’t really come up except in a scene where they’re spotted by a hunter who Piper assumes is racist and sure enough does have a Confederate flag sticker on his pickup truck.

The cop who arrested Dodge, Detective Matthew “Gib” Gibson (Will Patton, THE CLIENT), agrees to help with the search, but immediately notices that everything they’re telling him doesn’t make sense, and then he catches up to the other escapee in the woods only to see U.S. Marshal Pat Schiller (Robert John Burke, Robocop from ROBOCOP 3) shoot him unnecessarily. It seems in real life like that’s a pretty normal thing for cops to do, but here Gib sees him do it and he sees Gib see him and they both understand what’s going on here and it’s a tense moment.

Dodge is a hacker who doesn’t want to turn himself in because he needs to retrieve $5 million he stole, which he agrees to split with Piper. He seems unaware of the other reason not to go back – that there’s a police conspiracy to kill him to protect crime boss Matajano (Michael Nader, THE GREAT ESCAPE II: THE UNTOLD STORY).

The other actor that was exciting to see at the time was Salma Hayek; since her breakout in DESPERADO she’d only done FAIR GAME (with another Baldwin), FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, and something called FOLLOW ME HOME that according to Wikipedia “has yet to picked up by a major distribution company” but plays “universities and community centers” by request. So she was definitely a selling point for a new action movie. She plays Cora, a random woman the fledders force to drive them, and then they hide out at her apartment. She causes a brief gay panic by asking about their relationship in prison, is charmed by Piper’s kindness and Spanish-speaking, and lets Dodge wear her ex-husband’s clothes while he goes to meet up with some people about his hidden money.

This is the funniest part of the movie because he puts on this ridiculous turtleneck and doesn’t act like “well, this will have to do” but more like “this is the exact outfit I would have hired a stylist to create for me.” Generally in this movie his clothes make him look like he’s a doll who has to wear baggy clothes because it’s too hard to sew them that small.

There’s a catch-22 here that Baldwin is both the reason it doesn’t work very well and the most entertaining part because his character is pretty ridiculous. See, a good action movie can be formulaic like this, because it’s powered by the charisma and/or flying kicks of its star. Here we have Fishburne being effortlessly cool, while Baldwin seems convinced that he’s the cool one. He’s the type of character who will see a motorcycle and start spewing statistics about it and assume you are impressed. And when they’re trying to run while chained up his way of explaining that they need to run at the same speed is to say, “I’m a foster child, raised by the state. There was this caretaker who was like a father to me. His name was Titus. He taught me that everybody lives their life according to a rhythm. You make love to a rhythm. Your heart beats to a rhythm. If we’re gonna run together, we gotta get into the same rhythm.”

Who talks like that? Who stops during a run for their freedom to reminisce about a weird old man who told them that people only fuck at one speed? I’ll tell you: this fucking dork. While Piper just says, “I got your rhythm, convict” and starts playing harmonica. He’s cool.

The movie definitely presents Dodge as cool too. When he goes to a strip club he makes a bet with two other customers (MTV’s Bill Bellamy [WHO’S THE MAN?] and Taurean Blacque [OLIVER & COMPANY]) that he can kiss the dancer on the lips, and then he does. It’s a cheat, because he already knows Faith (Brittney Powell, AIRBORNE), who he goes home with for sex and computer research. Dodge has the Paul Kersey curse, though, so she’s immediately killed by his pursuers, and the same thing happens even faster when he catches up with his old friend Puffy (K. Addison Young). Don’t worry, not that Puffy. Just a big shot criminal guy who wants to meet him at a massage parlor.

I thought it would be a good twist if the guys coming after him are not looking for the disc, but for the turtleneck. Instead there’s a reveal that (spoiler) Piper is an undercover cop hired by Schiller to bust Dodge out so they could try to get an incriminating disc. He thinks it’s for an investigation. I don’t like this twist, not just because it makes him less cool to be a cop, but because it seems meant to justify Cora falling for her abductor. Also it’s funny that they didn’t bother to give him a fake criminal backstory. He never has to lie because nobody asks him what he was in for.

They get the dangerous disc, they dodge a Cuban hitman (Victor Rivers, L.A. TAKEDOWN, TWIN PEAKS: FIREWALK WITH ME), they borrow RuPaul’s car for a chase (RuPaul is cool about it because Piper says he’s a fan), they ride Ducatis in a scene not totally unlike THE MATRIX RELOADED, they have a final duel on a skycar full of tourists. It’s not nearly as good as the scene in NIGHTHAWKS, but it’s a fairly involved fight for such a small space. (Stunt coordinator: John Meier, who also did stunts in ERASER.)

I think I have a responsibility to note that Fishburne’s character Piper says “Time to pay the piper” before he kills the bad guy. So take that into consideration. And the running gag about Dodge comparing what’s going on to famous movies is even worse. It seems cheap when he brings up THE FUGITIVE in a scene where they’re in a culvert so we’re already thinking “they’re trying to do THE FUGITIVE.” But it’s inexcusable when, at the end, he asks Piper “Didn’t you see WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?” Somebody thought it was a great idea to combine the cheapest type of meta humor with a joke about Ike beating Tina, and end the movie on that!

Most of FLED is not that bad, though rarely better than adequate. It got poor reviews and didn’t make back its budget in theaters. However, it has kind of a good soundtrack, released by Rowdy Records, the label of TLC producer Dallas Austin. The cover says “FROM THE MGM MOTION PICTURE FLED – MUSIC FROM THE SOUTH.” Performers include T-Boz, Goodie Mob, The Tony Rich Project and Joi, plus an end credits song by Royal C (who sounds like Scarface from the Geto Boys) and I really didn’t notice it but somewhere there’s a title song by Fishbone. Yeah, that makes sense actually, because this was a few months after they’d released Chim Chim’s Badass Revenge, the raw and stripped down album they made after somehow hooking up with Austin.

This is not one of the great Fishbone songs, but I always like hearing Fishbone, just like I always like seeing Fishburne. So FLED at least passes the test of having the two Fishes in it… and yet it hardly excels even within that narrow criteria, because it’s not as good as EVERYDAY SUNSHINE: THE STORY OF FISHBONE, the documentary about Fishbone narrated by Fishburne.