City on Fire

Directed by Alvin Rakoff, City on Fire details the chaos that unfolds after an explosion at an oil refinery starts a chain reaction of fires within a nearby city. It’s a thoroughly promising setup that’s employed to disappointing and increasingly unwatchable effect by Rakoff, as the filmmaker, armed with Jack Hill, David P. Lewis, and Céline La Frenière’s screenplay, delivers a palpably low-rent thriller that slowly-but-surely squanders the efforts of an often strikingly eclectic cast – with the movie, at least, benefiting from the predictably compelling work of such commanding performers as Henry Fonda, Shelley Winters, and Leslie Nielsen. (Ava Gardner, playing an alcoholic news personality, remains unable to breathe any life into her sketchily-drawn figure, however.) The movie’s failure is especially disappointing given its proliferation of admittedly compelling sequences, including (and especially) an impressively tense stretch leading up to the aforementioned conflagration, and it’s clear, certainly, that City on Fire‘s shift from mildly passable to mostly interminable is triggered by a repetitive second half focused, predominantly, on several surviving characters’ efforts to escape from a newly-built hospital. And although Rakoff has peppered this portion of the proceedings with a few admittedly engrossing moments (eg a woman literally burns up after walking away from said hospital), City on Fire ultimately comes off as a misbegotten endeavor that’s rarely, if ever, able to live up to the potential afforded by its seemingly foolproof premise.

*1/2 out of ****