Firestorm

Firestorm is a 1998 American action thriller film directed by Dean Semler and starring Howie Long, Scott Glenn, William Forsythe, and Suzy Amis. Plot During a forest fire in northern Wyoming, smokejumper Jesse Graves (Howie Long) and his mentor Wynt Perkins (Scott Glenn) are rescuing trapped civilians in a forest fire when a woman begs them to rescue her daughter from a burning cabin. They locate the girl, but Wynt is injured by a travel trailer sent flying by an explosion. Jesse manages to free Wynt and rescue both him and the girl from a flashover; Wynt's injuries mean that he must retire from active duty as a smokejumper, but he balks at the idea of "full" retirement due to his inadequate pension plan. Months later, a group of Wyoming State convicts stage an escape with the help of an arsonist on the outside, who sets fire in the forest so that the prisoners will be taken there to help firemen, giving the prisoners a chance to escape. Randall Alexander Shaye (William Forsythe), who had stolen US$37 million four years previously and hidden it in the Wyoming forest, kills his cellmate and takes his identity as he and five other escapees go to retrieve the money. They pose as Canadian firefighters and take Jennifer (Suzy Amis), a bird watcher, hostage along the way. Unbeknownst to all of them, another forest fire has started due to a lightning strike from a week earlier. Jesse, realizing that the "firefighters" are convicts in disguise, must find a way to stop Shaye and his group of convicts and save Jennifer at the same time. Over the course of the film, Shaye starts to kill off his men in order to collect the money himself, starting with fellow prisoners Wilkins, a mapmaker and Karge, a former wrestler, but finds out that the money was destroyed in the fire. He then proceeds to kill Loomis, a former Air Force pilot by pushing him off a cliff to make it look like an accident, and shoots Packer, a serial rapist, after he gets caught in a spring trap set up by Jesse. Wynt does everything he can to help Jesse, and to save Jennifer.