10 Wildly Underrated Action Movies Of The 90s

While Brandon Lee didn't officially break through to the mainstream until his final film, The Crow, hit theatres as something of a post-mortem sleeper hit, the opportunity was there for him to become a movie star two years earlier. But we, as an audience, missed it. And we should feel very, very bad about that.

Rapid Fire sure felt like a "kicking down the doors" moment for the budding star, who upgraded this cynical, straightforward actioner with his intrinsic charisma, stirring wit, and effortless arm-breaking abilities. But sadly, the film never took off.

To be fair, the accidental-witness-to-a-mob-hit plot is certainly derivative, and it's hard not to wince at the stock characters that play like copies of a copy (Nick Mancuso as the hammy, spaghetti slurping mafia goon is especially cringeworthy). But Lee makes up for most of that as the sympathetic leading man who doesn't want to kick anybody's ass, but desperately needs to kick everybody's ass to save himself from an unmarked grave.

And those fight sequences a thing of beauty. At one point he knocks a guy off a flight of stairs by kicking through the railing...for instance.

Rapid Fire may not have been the star turn Lee deserved, but it's a little like watching 10 Things I Hate About You in the present day and realizing, in retrospect, that Heath Ledger had much bigger things on the horizon.