Don Shanahan
Every now and again, that old classic W. C. Fields quote of “Never work with animals or children” is recited in reference to a movie. People often misuse W. C.’s quote to describe workplace difficulty when it was really intended to warn against animals and children stealing the show from the trained adults. How right he was! The latest delightful piece of resulting evidence supporting Fields is Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire, a 2023 Cannes Film Festival darling finally getting its due to play in theaters.
Riddle of Fire introduces audiences to the fictional town of Ribbon, Wyoming. As the camera stays wide to soak in the idyllic Utah vistas, captions styled in a Tolkien-esque font speak of faery castles, swords, knights, squires, and kindred spirits. Those thematically chosen words and the mystical synth musical score by Hole Dweller enunciate that we’re in for a sinuous fairy tale of a wholly different sort because of who, thanks to the W. C. Fields quote, is presented as the heroes of this fable.
Alas, children are the enchanting culprits for what Fields was talking about for Riddle of Fire. The movie features a triumvirate of pre-teens—Alice, Jodie, and Hazel—played respectively by Phoebe Ferro, Skyler Peters, and Charlie Stover (the former two of which are making their feature debuts alongside Stover coming over from Yellowstone). Suffice to say, these are not your normal tweens of today with their noses in apps and devices while occasionally strafing around the neighborhood on a bike or scooter. These three call themselves the “Three Immortal Reptiles,” brandish paintball guns, and tear it up the streets and countryside on dirt bikes. If you’re saying, “These are my kind of kids,” you’re in for a ride!
Hearing these three drop some colorful language while brazenly breaking into places to steal stuff, the descriptive words for their frowned-upon behavior start to flow. “Handful,” “unruly,” “delinquents,” “rabble rousers,” and maybe even “warriors” are probably a few that come to mind. Seeing their unsupervised chicanery, unbridled imagination, and podunk resourcefulness, this writer’s going to go old school and liken Alice, Jodie, and Hazel to mischievous and cheeky “rascals” of the ancient Hal Roach Our Gang shorts. That’s the shoe that fits best.
After these three scallywags break into a warehouse to daringly steal an Otomo Angel entertainment system, they return to Hazel and Jodie’s house in hopes of firing up a day of gaming only to discover that the TV has an assigned parental lock. The person they need to butter up is their single mother Julie (TV actress Danielle Hoetmer), but she’s laid up in bed with a rough flu and cold. Julie propositions the sweet-talking kids that she’ll give them the passcode if they can bring home her favorite dessert, a local blueberry pie made by Celia the Baker (Unicorn City’s Colleen Baum). To them, that request sounds easy enough, but, as promised, a grand pursuit lies ahead.
The Three Immortal Reptiles come to find Celia is out of blueberry pies and not in her bakery for the day. The three hellions go straight to her home and twist her arm to give them the secret recipe. With a shopping list in hand, they head to the supermarket for a running scavenger hunt and coordinated heist of ingredients, complete with a “Trick Time” distraction bit to bolt out the door unseen. All’s well except for the fact a rugged cowboy named Johnny Redrye (Charles Halford of Netflix’s Outer Banks series) mercilessly claimed the last dozen of the all-important speckled eggs that makes the pies special.
Rebuffed rudely by Johnny, Alice has now marked their quarry. Our teenage tikes may have bitten off more than they can chew as Johnny is the muscle for “The Enchanted Blade Gang,” a quartet of wanted criminals on the lam lead by the pistol-packing “witch” Anna-Freya Hollyhock (Lio Tipton of Crazy, Stupid, Love). To chase their goal, they must infiltrate Hollyhock’s movements from their cabin to the trails of Faery Castle Mountain and through other dangerous associates and obstacles. Like petulant children who push back against belittling admonishment and don’t back down from what they want, they’re set to go to the ends of the Earth to get one solitary egg. What’s rugged topography and a few underestimating knuckleheads going to do to slow them down? You already know the answer.
Above all else, you have to admire the initiative granted to these three characters and conveyed by their matching child actors. Phoebe Ferro is a riot as the rambunctious mouthpiece and boss of the bunch, stoking the embers of revenge while going toe-to-toe with the adults with convincing vigor. Beneath her, Skyler Peters—who gets subtitles to translate his thick drawl—is the protected young mascot while Charlie Stover is the responsive man of action who finds every pickle of trouble. All of them are out there putting themselves through the paces of physical comedy for stunt coordinators Corbett McAllister (Trim Season) and Christian Russell (Deadstream).
Take stock for a moment in what Riddle of Fire stands to be. You’ve got an ambitious rural adventure movie darting through wooden locations threading webs upon webs of fantasy yarn featuring three virtually unknown child actors. And it’s all to bake a blueberry pie to score a digital password. There’s beauty to be found in the combination of fancifulness and simplicity created by writer-director Weston Razooli, making his feature-length directorial debut after a vitae of shorts and music videos.
No major studio is showing the courage to make anything as rich and outlandish as Riddle of Fire without overinflating a premise wildly out of scale with special effects or skipping humans altogether for animation instead. From the bright 16mm film stock saturation used by cinematographer Jake Mitchell (8 Billion Angels) to the kitschy sound effects from supervising sound editor Garrard Whatley (The Wolf of Snow Hollow), the movie warps modern time to something more bygone and surreal. While it may not overtake the likes of The Goonies or Stand By Me in the pantheon of big screen rascals, Weston Razooli has found the right infectious ambition to grab our attention and join the cult following.
