Fire Serpent is a pretty run of the mill sci-fi channel movie of the week, which is strange considering how the one who 'created' the fire serpent concept, William Shatner, probably comes up with more wacky ideas than this. There's actually some messed-up creature potential with a thing like a 'fire serpent', as it's basically a gigantic fire-ball that spouts out of the sun, crashes to Earth, and sustains itself on human life and fossil fuels. But not much else is really explored, or exploited, aside from so-typical-it's-meh character schemes and a fairly complex level of figuring out how it is that the fire serpent actually goes about its business or how it can be stomped out. It's too run of the mill to get into any real interesting ground, but when compared to the last sci-fi channel movie featuring a Buffy alumni, Gryphon, Fire Serpent doesn't go into the depths of wretchedly hellish tripe all around.
This time we just get Nicholas Brendon as the 'young, teach-me-everything-from-a-mentor' young fireman, who meets Dutch Fallon (Randolph Mantooth, who's name is probably much cooler than anything else in the movie), a man who's been tracking the fire serpent for forty years, ever since it destroyed his girlfriend (which we see in a first inexplicable flashback at the start, then a second one where it's not really from his point of view as seen). Dutch, despite being an arsonist, is under the eye of an old rival, played by Rober Beltran, who also happens to be a big religious freak (some of this dialog is actually really funny, unintentionally of course). It all leads up to a showdown at a fossil-fuel station, where finally the cheesy sci-fi visual effects and limited action get their dues. Throughout we're treated to pretty half-note (not even quite one-note) characters, who occasionally talk in sound bytes from what might have been Shatner's pitch to the networks.
The lack of logic at times doesn't kill one's soul, but there's also not much to gorge on if you're looking for heavy action or twisted moments of delirious flights of sci-fi fancy; closest things I saw were when the serpent cut a woman in half (through a human host), and an amazingly entertaining- for all the wrong reasons- scene where a henchman tosses a grenade in Jake's car, leading to a very odd scene with the henchman just standing a while holding a targeting gun and not doing anything until a policeman and the fire serpent do their own things in the scene. Yet a lot of the time I just sat waiting for stuff to happen that built up to nothing very special, and a climax that didn't have me yelling or cursing at the screen but seemed still annoying in just going bigger and crazier (and not fun crazy) until that last warped moment of an open-book ending. Fire Serpent 2 perhaps? I'd really hope not, as there wasn't enough to really sustain the first one, except over-cooked plot contrivances (or under-cooked depending on point of view), cardboard acting (even when one is shot and near-death), and a fairly limited creature by way of the visual effects (not like Gryphon, though that's like saying it's the clap instead of AIDS).
