Bruce Willis wears an unidentified watch

In Fire with Fire, Bruce Willis crouches low against a graffitied brick wall at night, a police cruiser parked beside him and another officer moving up through the haze behind him. He is Mike Cella, a detective lieutenant who has spent years trying to put away David Hagan, the Aryan Brotherhood boss who killed Cella's old partner. On the wrist resting across his knee sits a dark watch on a black strap, the crystal catching a bead of streetlight before the dial falls into shadow and keeps its maker to itself.

Willis gets second billing, and the part is a supporting one: the case Cella works belongs to someone else's movie. That movie is Jeremy Coleman's, played by Josh Duhamel, a Long Beach firefighter who steps into a convenience store for snacks and watches Hagan shoot the owner and his son. Coleman agrees to testify and is relocated to New Orleans under a new name, guarded by a deputy US marshal named Talia Durham, played by Rosario Dawson. Then Hagan calls to say he will kill everyone Coleman loves whether the testimony comes or not.

So Coleman walks away from witness protection and goes after Hagan himself, which is where the title stops being a figure of speech. The studio had Willis, Duhamel, Dawson, D'Onofrio and 50 Cent and still sent the picture straight to DVD on November 6, 2012, where it earned about 2.4 million dollars in home-video sales and a 7 percent score from the fifteen critics Rotten Tomatoes logged. It was the first feature directed by David Barrett, a career stunt coordinator, and his trade is the part the ending leans on: a firefighter, whose whole job is putting fires out, wins by burning a building down.