Born to Raise Hell (2010)

It's a high-octane, white knuckle thrill ride!

 
It was clear from the prologue that I was going to have a few problems with this movie. The opening scene features a subtitle that reads "Bucharest, Romania", which is rarely a good sign, followed by a nonsensical voiceover that is clearly not Seagal. Then there is a gunfight with Tony-Scott-on-PCP editing that goes way beyond any hope of visual comprehension. At this point the film was giving me flashbacks to early DTV Seagal like Shadow Man or The Foreigner. Not a good start.

Seagal plays Bobby Samuels, a cop working for the International Drug Task Force (IDTF). He used to be a soldier if Afghanistan, but when he learned how most terrorism is (apparently) funded by drugs he joined the IDTF so he could make the world safe for freedom etc. He also explains that his partner was killed and now he's out for revenge, although if they followed up on that plot thread I guess I missed it.

The main plot reminds me a little of Out for Justice. There's a big shot crime boss, but the main villain is a guy lower down the food chain who is out of control. The guy's name is Costel, and he likes to do home invasions on young rich couples, raping the women and murdering entire families. Costel works for a Spetznaz-trained Russian crime boss named Dimitri (Dan Badarau), but when Dimitri finds out what Costel is up to he is disgusted and wants him dead. At first Seagal is content to arrest Dimitri, but when he gets into a war with Costel Seagal forms an alliance with him. The grudging-respect-between-foes thing. I like that.

This movie was written by Seagal himself and seems to be pretty heavily influenced by his experiences on Steven Seagal: Lawman. There's a lot of cop lingo and gunpoint standoffs with criminals where Seagal shouts things like "lemme see yo' hands, bitch". At one point he shouts "I'm speaking English, it's easy" which seems condescending since he's in Romania. There are several scenes of him chewing out a junior officer for not properly securing suspects or clearing rooms because he was distracted by a woman with awesome tits. It's nothing we haven't seen before in other cop shows, but it's a little more attention to detail than you usually get for this kind of thing. Stuff like that caused the movie to grow on me.

One bit I liked was early in the film where Seagal's team bust into a house to arrest a greasy-haired drug dealer. The guy tries to drive away on his dirtbike (which is parked in his lounge room for some reason) but Seagal rips him from the seat at the last minute, sending the bike careening through a glass window. It's a nice sequence and normally that would be the last we'd see of the criminal, but here Seagal actually arrests him and takes him to the police station for questioning. Seagal gets information out of him not by busting his skull but by calmly explaining the situation. You catch more flies with honey than by breaking their wrists and throwing them through a window, I guess.

I also liked that the bad guys have a bunch of hot women who cook and smuggle their drugs and go on assassination missions. They are like sexy Terminators. There's a really funny bit where the team encounter one while on a covert survellaince mission. She appears right next to their police van like a movie monster and presses her face up against the window while the crew sit there in dead silence like she's the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. I know it's just a way to get a few more hot girls into the movie, but I really like this idea of using supermodels as henchmen. More movie villains should exploit the fact that hot woman can basically do anything they want without consequence.

Seagal has a much younger girlfriend in this one too, and there's even a subplot about how he neglects her and spends too much time with his police work. The film also continues the worrying trend of awkward sex scenes where the girl is bare-ass naked and Seagal is fully clothed. He's wearing a giant kimono/bathrobe/hoodie thing with a dragon stitched on the back. It looks ridiculous but I guess I should be grateful for it. The whole situation is pretty creepy because the girl is tiny compared to him. When he gets on top of her and starts pawing at her with his giant mitts it looks like she's being attacked by bigfoot.

I mentioned it ealier, but there is some shocking editing in this film. Whenever Costel and his men do a home invasion the film turns into an Abode After-Effects disaster, with random skipped frames, slow motion effects, freeze frames and double exposures. There's a lot of superfluous slow motion too. A scene where Costel's crew walk through a nightclub goes on for about three minutes. Gunfights are similarly over-edited, making them unbearable to watch for the most part, although I liked the bit where Seagal blasts the section of wall around a door with a shotgun so he can kick the whole wall in. He even has to pause halfway through so he can reload. I would have just blown the lock out, but I'll concede to Seagal's superior wisdom and police experience.

It's interesting how as Seagal gets older and stiffer they are trying to compensate by making the fights more brutal and violent, and Seagal's fights were always pretty brutal and violent. There are a lot of broken bones and every punch to the face sends a gallon of blood spraying out of the victim's mouth. The fist fights are pretty well directed for the most part. Costel is played by Darren Shahlavi, the guy who played Twister in Ip Man 2, so it would have been cool to see him in an actual fight, but the final showdown makes copious use of stunt doubles and is embarrassingly one-sided. More shades of Out for Justice.

The director is a French stuntman by the name of Lauro Chartrand, who also did some episodes of Seagal's new TV show/DTV movie series True Justice. I can't say I really liked his style, but I appreciate that Seagal seemed to be putting in slightly more effort than usual. Maybe he pounded a few cans of Steven Seagal's Lightning Bolt Energy Drink before every take, or maybe the fact that he wrote it himself gave him a little more vigour. Either way it's nice to see him only semi-sleepwalking through a movie. Even if half his lines were dubbed.

A Dangerous Man (2009)

Seagal will fuck you up ugly

In a strange coincidence I received DVDs for both A Dangerous Man and A Serious Man in the mail on the same day, which left me with a difficult decision to make. One Coen brothers' black comedy about a Jewish physics professor struggling with his faith. One DTV action film where Steven Seagal kicks Chinese dudes in the junk. A difficult choice for any cinephile, but I think I made the right one.

In the prologue we learn why Seagal is the titular Man. His girlfriend Holly is waiting in her car when she gets attacked by a rapist. Seagal shows up to rescue her and chases him away, but the next day the would-be rapist shows up dead in an alley. Although Seagal swears he is innocent the cops accuse him of being an uncontrollable killing machine (understandable) and lock him up. Cut to six years later and Holly sends Seagal a "Dear John" letter. He must have known this was coming too, because he reads it outside alone in the prison yard at night in the pouring rain. That sort of heavy-handed dramatic context doesn't happen by accident.

It's not all bad news though. The very next day Seagal is released thanks to some exonerating DNA evidence, although it's never revealed who actually killed the rapist or why. He's also offered $300k by Uncle Sam but Seagal refuses, saying he only wants his life back. This is all thanks to the Innocence Project, although if they'd known what he'd get up to afterwards they probably would have reconsidered.

All Seagal wants to do now is drown his sorrows with a bottle of generic bourbon, but you can probably guess how that goes. Liquor store, muggers etc. I did like that Seagal tells the punks that he's going to "fuck [them] up ugly". I especially like that one of the muggers asks him what it means, like he couldn't have discerned its meaning from context. In this case it means that Seagal's going to steal his gun, take the slide off the barrel, repeatedly stab him in the face with the pointy end and then kick him through a window. Which is pretty ugly. Then Seagal calls him a "bitch" and steals his car.

While drinking alone in a parking lot, Seagal somehow gets caught up in a confusingly-edited gunfight between the son of a Russian crime boss, a cop and some Chinese gangsters with a kidnapped girl in their trunk. The girl is named Tia, and she's the niece of a big-shot accountant in China who has the dirt on some high-ranking officials. He was being smuggled to America until the gangsters realised how important he was and held him hostage. Seagal agrees to help the girl save her uncle, but interestingly the reason he helps her is because she says she'll help him leave the country. I don't think I've seen a movie hero with that particular motivation before.

The main bad guy is called Chen and somehow he owns all the local cops. Not just one either, the whole lot. Chen is also involved with a corrupt Chinese military official called The Colonel (played by Byron Mann from Belly of the Beast). I thought it was pretty funny how Chen acts like a bigshot with his nice suits, huge cigars, dancing with hookers etc, but he does it all out of his shitty wood-panelled dockside office. There's a bit where he tries to lure a disinterested Colonel into partying with a hooker by saying she has an "ass like a 10 year old boy", a line which I've heard before but always sticks out to me as unappealing and kind of gross. Anyway, eventually the Colonel turns on Chen and takes over his business.

For a while it seems like they're trying to set up a buddy relationship between Seagal and Sergey, but Sergey is not the most compelling character so they forget about it about halfway through. At one point I thought Sergey was shot by The Colonel's men while he was hanging out with a topless hooker in a pool, but I guess it was some other guy. Seagal is eventually helped out by Sergey's dad, who lives in one of those huge mansions where there's a party full of young, hip people going on 24 hours a day. Seems like it would get pretty annoying after a while, especially since it looks like Vlad is sitting in his office trying to work. By the end of the film Seagal and Vlad take on The Colonel I think, but by this point I was pretty confused. In my defence it was pretty boring.

I liked that The Keeper didn't indulge in the embarrassing DTV tradition of giving Seagal a much younger, hotter girlfriend, even though they had several opportunities to do so. They show no such restraint here. There's a part early in the film where Seagal sits in his stolen car and fondly reminisces about the time his girlfriend stripped butt naked and gave him a lap dance while he sat there fully clothed and fumbled with her boobs. By the epilogue it's implied that he's sleeping with Tia as well, but thankfully their on-screen shenanigans are limited to an awkward hug. Kind of a dick move though, because Sergey saved her life and it seemed like he was sweet on her.

One interesting point is that I think Seagal is supposed to be a Native American. At one point he calls Sergey "white boy", which I thought was just Seagal randomly breaking out into ebonics like he does sometimes. Later on, however, one of the bad guys refers to him as "that Native American". After all the fringed leather jackets he's worn and ancient mysticism he's spouted in his other films, it's weird that this is the one where they decided to go full on Billy Jack. Not that it figures into anything else in the film or is ever mentioned again.

There are a lot of lines that sound really strange and I can't tell if it's because they were poorly written or badly delivered or both. “I will leave you here to get eaten by the fuckin jackals, who are coming soon." Stuff like that. Seagal's delivery is generally pretty mumbly and incoherent, but it must have been particularly bad here because they dub his voice about half the time. At least the guy almost sounds like Seagal. Usually they'll get any old guy to whisper all the lines and call it a day, even though Seagal hasn't done that whispery thing in years.

The gun fights aren't particularly well shot, but they're okay. It's just alternating shots of two guys firing from behind cover until one of them falls over dead. The fight scenes are a little better and are really brutal. Seagal feeds one guy into industrial shredder, kicks another guy face-first into circular saw and pounds a chopstick into a guy's neck. Throughout the whole thing he's invincible like Jason Voorhees. Stunt doubles are used frequently and sometimes it gets a little distracting. One fight is shot through the gap in some shelving so that they don't have to go to trouble of obscuring the double's head through editing. No stunt double for the lap dance scene though. Sometimes you've just got to get your hands dirty.

This one comes courtesy of Leoni Waxman, the same guy who did The Keeper. I still haven't decided which one I like better. This film is superior in terms of quantity and brutality of action, but Seagal only wears his Half Past Dead do-rag. In The Keeper he wears a huge cowboy hat. Clearly further analysis is required.

The Keeper (2009)

Yee-haw!

I've fallen a few movies behind in my On-Deadly-Ground-style spiritual odyssey through the DTV ouvre of Mr Steven Seagal. This one had been sitting on my DVD queue for some time, but I hadn't felt compelled to review it since the two subsequent films (A Dangerous Man and Born to Raise Hell) were still MIA. A year or two later and the Region 4 DVDs have lazily flopped onto Australian shores with all the energy and vigour of DTV-era Seagal himself, so I guess I've got some catching up to do.

In this one he plays Roland Sallinger, Super Cop. As the movie begins, he and his partner raid a drug dealing operation to discover a couple of million dollars in cash. His partner suggests that they help themselves and Seagal refuses, so his partner shoots him in the chest and leaves him for dead. Seagal fakes a coma and steals a gun from his niece, so I figured this film was a Hard to Kill type deal and that his revenge would play out over the course of the film. Instead his partner returns to finish the job that night, so Seagal shoots him and frees up the next 70 minutes of screentime for a completely unrelated plot.

Seagal is forced into retirement as a result of his injuries, sending him into a depression, so he is visited by his niece who says ridiculous yet no doubt confidence-bolstering things like "You're an inspiration to everyone on the SWAT team" and "I've seen you do shit that's beyond belief." It's not quite R. Lee Ermey's "million dollar smile and a fistful of pesos" speech from On Deadly Ground, but it's enough to get Seagal montaging his way back to full health. His state of recovery is symbolised by his knife-throwing abilities, which was neat but I suspect it was because it required as little physicality from Seagal as possible.

The plot starts proper when he gets a call from an old friend in Texas. He wants Seagal to be a personal bodyguard for his daughter, who was recently the target of an attempted kidnapping by some criminals disguised as papparazzi. The bad guy behind the kidnapping attempt is a crooked real estate developer named Jason Cross, who is also a racial separatist although it never comes up as a plot point or is even mentioned again. When Seagal asks why he can't just go to the police, he replies "There are some people who think a man's race should determine his worth. These people control everything. Except me". This apparently explains everything, even though the police seem more eager to nail Cross than Seagal does.

The girl Seagal is looking after is a spoiled heiress, but I liked that they didn't push the Paris Hilton angle too hard. She's reasonably intelligent and acquits herself pretty well during the attempted kidnapping. They could have easily made her into an annoying bimbo, but instead she's sympathetic and even kind of sentimental. At one point she tells Seagal how she kept a gift he gave her when she was a little girl. She tells him that right after drunkenly barfing in an alley, but it was still kind of a sweet moment. I was worried for a moment there because it seems like she was hitting on him, but luckily Seagal Keeps it in his pants.

Her boyfriend is a showboating obnoxious asshole named Mason Silver, who is apparently a professional boxer although he sure doesn't look like one and you never see him do any fighting aside from a brief training scene at the beginning. Seems like a missed opportunity not to have him fight Seagal or at least one of the bad guys. He is a massive douchebag, so much so that you wonder if he's a red herring, but it turns out that he had some dealings with Cross in the past and now he's willing to sell out his girlfriend rather than have his hands crushed by Cross's goons. What a prick.

Actually, Seagal is kind of a prick in this one too. He's a massive dick to a limo driver, flat-out ignoring him when he tries to make conversation and then sarcastically berating him for whistling. It's okay though, because Seagal gains his respect when he stops to help the limo driver's cousin from being harrassed by a couple of thugs. Probably the most dickish moment is when Seagal breaks into Mason's house to question him and kills three of his bodyguards. At first I figured they were Cross' henchmen, but apparently not. Seagal just straight up murdered three dudes for no reason. And the cops don't even care.

The plot is some nonsense about a crooked real estate deal and a hidden uranium deposit, but it's pretty straight forward and I won't bother talking about it. The action is what's important, and it's alright I guess. The film tries it's best to convince us of Seagal's lightning fast aikido moves, but sound design and editing can do only so much. Plus the main bad guy is an old man, so it doesn't really lend itself to a thrilling final confrontation. The gunfights have lots of bloody, overfilled squibs, which is good, but they are over-edited with a general lack of geography. There's also decent car chase, even though it's clear that Seagal was being greenscreened on a soundstage somewhere.

I don't know if it's because I haven't watched these types of films in a while, but Seagal's acting seemed distractingly bad here. He wears a big cowboy hat, uses words like "pod'ner" and speaks a little Spanish, but I think those efforts used up the bulk of his acting abilities. He's never been good, but here he's struggling just to even articulate himself. A lot of his lines are awkwardly phrased, as if he only just glanced at the script and refused to do a second take. His shirts are increasingly oversized and baggy to disguise his weight and his hair is becoming more creepily fake and Dracula-like. It's rough.

That aside though, the quality level isn't among his worst. It gets off to a shabby start, with some obvious dubbing in the opening scene, plus halfway through the film Seagal's character's name changes from "Sallinger" to "Ballinger" for no reason, but at least it mostly makes sense. The plot holes are just plot holes rather than supermassive black holes that threaten to suck the whole movie into oblivion. I guess that makes it less interesting than something completely batshit like Out of Reach, but at least I felt like someone gave a shit. Someone was at least half-assing it, rather than the one eighth of an ass normally given to this kind of thing. Adequate job, guy. You did it.

Ruslan (2009)

In this film Seagal plays a Russian crime novelist.
Yes, really.

For some reason this film is known under the title Driven to Kill in the US, which is kind of weird because although it sounds like a pun about cars there isn't a car chase in the entire film. I guess they wanted a title that followed fundamentalist Seagalian title grammar (ie adjective, preposition, verb). Over here we aren't such hardcore Seagalogists (it's mainly a Christmas and Easter thing), so it's known under the much better title Ruslan.

The film starts with Seagal having lunch with his much, much younger girlfriend. She offers him a three way with her best friend if he shows her his paper cup trick, which is kind of like the shell game or three card monte, except if you guess wrong you get a metal spike impaled through your hand. When she asks him how he does it he replies "The secret is to not give a fuck", which is coincidentally how Seagal is able to produce up to four direct-to-video films a year. She is so turned on by this that she sexily bites her lip, but thankfully you don't find out whether she followed through on her offer. One hot, young girl making sexy eyes at Seagal is bad enough, two would have blown my already overtaxed suspension of disbelief and we're only a couple of minutes in.

The inexplicably hot, young girlfriend is a typical feature of modern-era Seagal, but here he plays a completely different character than usual. Rather than an ex-CIA agent he is Ruslan, an ex-Russian gangster who now writes crime novels under the pen name Jim Vincent. We know he's a Russian novelist because he's got a post-it that reads "Tolstoy, Chekov, Pishkin" stuck up on his monitor while he writes his terrible pulp crime thrillers. I guess for inspiration. Thankfully his Russian background isn't pointless window-dressing like in Half Past Dead. He's got the sleeve tattoos, he's got the accent (sometimes) and he even he attempts a few words of Russian here and there, even if they dub over him when it's important or when other Russian-speaking actors would make him look bad.

He is busy writing his latest novel when his ex-wife calls him up and asks him to be at his estranged daughter Lanie's wedding the next day. Like in Pistol Whipped, his ex-wife is now married to a huge asshole (a defense lawyer named Terry Goldstein) but she is still so attracted to Seagal that she all but fucks him right in front of her new husband. He discovers that Lanie (Laura Mennell) is engaged to the son of a big-time Russian gangster who betrayed him in the past. Small world! His would-be son-in-law Stephan (Dmitry Chepovetsky) assures him that he has no intentions of following in his father's footsteps but sure enough some gangsters bust in, kill his ex-wife and attack his daughter.

Lanie survives the attack however, and Seagal manages to convince the police to keep things quiet while he tracks down the attackers. He also goads Stephan into helping him by basically calling him a pussy in front of his dad Mikhail (Igor Jijinike who played the scary Russian bad guy in Indiana Jones and the Search for More Money). He does this to upset Mikhail and to make sure that Stephan didn't have anything to do with the attack, but I also get the impression that it's his way of sizing him up and making sure he's good enough for his daughter. It's like one of those films where the father and the son-in-law bond over a fishing trip, except here they are bonding over murder.

It used to be that every action film would include a scene in a strip club but it doesn't happen too much these days. Or if they do it's some alternate-universe bizarro strip club where guys buy $15 watery beers to ogle fully clothed women. Well, here they bring that old tradition back, the girls take their tops off and everything. Seagal even has a bonding experience with his would-be son-in-law while they are having a private dance in a back room. They look very uncomfortable during the whole thing and the stripper must be pretty jaded because when the two of them start openly discussing all the murders they've committed she doesn't even flinch. Naturally some mobsters show up, leading to a surprisingly gory knife fight with squirting gouts and blood and messy impalements.

The fights are generally well executed with relatively subtle use of stunt doubles and decent editing, though they are often uncomfortably brutal, on the level of the curb stomp in Kill Switch. Seagal rams a broken glass into some asshole's face, he smashes a pawn shop owner's head through a glass countertop when he refuses to give out information and he stabs a guy in the neck with a metal spike and has to fight him until he bleeds out. He also savagely beats a guy with a plank, but the brutality is undercut by the fact that it's clearly made from balsa wood. The best one is where he stabs someone in the eye with the barrel of his gun and then pulls the trigger. That's some hardcore shit. Give Seagal a hockey mask and this could almost be a Friday the 13th sequel.

After his strip club fight a couple of cops arrest Seagal but they are generally useless and do diddly-shit. His ex-ex-wife's new husband bails him out and unsurprisingly he turns out to be an even bigger asshole than first thought (in some ways this movie is like a fantasy for divorced fathers). It all culminates in a final showdown where Mikhail and his crew dress up in police uniforms and storm the hospital where Lanie is recovering. It's not exactly Hard Boiled but there is a lot of gunfire and Seagal manages to do some pretty cool stuff, such as set up ambushes and make an improvised nail bomb.

Thankfully this film is a huge step up from Kill Switch and Against the Dark. In fact, I'd say we are back up to a Urban/Renegade Justice level of quality here. Very promising. Although Seagal is looking pretty chunky and his hair is looking more and more like a brillo pad with a widow's peak, I appreciated the effort he put into his role and that the film is free of Seagal's questionable sartorial choices (although he does manage to work a dragon shirt into the opening scene). This is Seagal's first film as part of a new distribution deal with 20th Century Fox, and if this is the level of quality we can expect from Seagal in the future then I'm looking forward to his next blood-spraying, wrist-snapping adventure.

Ticker (2001)

This is the kind of film where pretty much
everyone wears leather jackets exclusively.

Chronologically in Seagal's filmography, Ticker is a Direct-to-Video sandwiched between a couple of theatrical releases so it represents a fairly interesting period in his career. It's interesting for a couple of other reasons too. Firstly, Seagal doesn't play the main character, he's just one of an impressive B-movie cast including Dennis Hopper, Tom Sizemore and Kevin Gage. Secondly, he does very little fighting, instead spending most of the film providing spiritual guidance to Tom Sizemore. Good for him, Sizemore could probably use some spiritual advice.

Seagal plays Glass, a former Department of Defense employee now in charge of the bomb squad for the San Francisco PD. He leads a pack of wacky bomb experts: one guy (played by Kevin Gage) always wears a Hawaiian shirt and backwards baseball cap, another is a girl with crazy multi-coloured hair, so you know... Hollywood wacky. The film begins with Seagal in the basement of a Senator's mansion, trying to defuse a bomb while the cops engage in a tense stand-off outside. Inside the mansion a bunch of terrorists are blasting all the guests and catering staff with machine guns in footage clearly edited in from a different film. Seagal is unable to defuse the bomb in time and the mansion goes up in a series of impressive fiery explosions cribbed from other films.

From here on in we spend most of our time with Tom Sizemore, playing Detective Nettles (because he stings everything he touches and he makes good soup). He has a mysterious past and everyone is a complete asshole to him, so I figured he must have busted a fellow cop or fucked up a hostage situation or something. It's nothing like that, turns out his wife and kid were killed by a car bomb. The flashback is pretty funny too, during the slow-motion walk to the doomed car they turn around and wave multiple times, salute him, give each other a high-five etc. Even if you knew it was the last time you'd ever see them, you'd still be like "Jeez, get in the car already". His dead family doesn't really explain why all his co-workers are such dicks but I guess when you're played by Tom Sizemore you shouldn't be surprised when everyone treats you a like a sleazy scumbag.

When Nettles first meets Seagal he is given a wildly sarcastic speech about their jobs and is confused by their bomb squad lingo (apparently they don't defuse bombs but "treat" "devices"), but eventually Seagal takes him under his wing. This gives Seagal a chance to dispense some of his patented spiritual advice, like "you've got to get beyond hope and fear and learn the nature of your own mind" and "love is eternal, and that's a long time." He also employs Mr Miyagi style abstract teaching methods in bomb disposal, such as showing Nettles how to fix his watch. "You've just made you first ticker" he says proudly, which is probably overselling things but is no doubt good for Nettles' self esteem.

Dennis Hopper plays the villain, a mad bomber named Alex Swan. Like the guy he played in Speed except here he wears more leather jackets. He's the kind of power-mad guy who refers to his bombs as works of art and makes so many references to Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel that you'd wish he'd take an art studies course just so he could come up with a second reference. He is supposed to be Irish, judging from the lilting folk music that kicks in every time a bomb goes off, but his accent is pretty terrible and mostly absent. Maybe if he slipped into a proper Irish accent he'd flip out like he did while shooting Mad Dog Morgan. Irish accents are Dennis Hopper's red kryponite. Anyway, you can't expect method acting from a guy who's only around for a day of shooting.

Rapper Nas plays Nettles' partner Fuzzy. He's a pretty lousy actor but thankfully he isn't in the film for very long, despite his top billing. In the first act he suffers a protracted, cliche-ridden death scene, complete with Nettles shaking him and shouting "Don't you die on me!" He dies (spoiler) but before he does he tells Nettles to "let go of his demons". Pretty nice of him to use his final breath to play Dr Phil for Nettles. Jaime Pressly (from My Name is Earl) plays Claire, Alex's lover. Her husband was supposedly offed because he blew the whistle on a company that was building housing over a toxic waste dump. Now she wants revenge against... the city? I don't know. For most of the film she is in custody while Alex sets off a series of bombs until they agree to let her go, but once she escapes it becomes clear that she has a larger role in things than they thought.

Anyway, the big plan is that they are planning on blowing up the new City Hall building during the gala opening (a Halloween party with thumping techno, not really what I was expecting actually). When they storm the building there's a rooftop gunfight apparently spliced in from the Dolph Lundgren vehicle The Peacekeeper. Seagal does some unimpressive aikido in a hallway (his only fight scene in the film) although he does break an arm or two and throw someone through a window, thus fulfilling the minimum requirements for any Seagal fight scene. In the end he has to talk Nettles through defusing a bomb and he starts by giving a rambling incoherent speech about "getting beyond fear". Defusing the bomb turns out to be surprisingly easy, especially since Seagal's advice is pretty much "pick a wire and hope for the best".

This film was directed by notorious hack Albert Pyun (Cyborg and about a million Nemesis films) and although it doesn't contain cyborgs, Ticker has all of his other hallmarks. Lots of recycled footage, a story that is as confusing as it is boring and brief and uninteresting fight scenes. Apparently it was shot in about two weeks and it shows. Headlining actors were only available for few days of shooting apiece so they very rarely share screen time, leading to a disjointed screenplay that works hard to keep actors as far apart as possible. It was nice to see Seagal in a "wise sensei" role, but even he couldn't defuse this bomb.

Kill Switch (2008)

I hope you like this stunt, because

you'll be seeing it a dozen times

Kill Switch is one of the most recent films to plop out of Seagal's Direct-to-Video sausage machine. In it he plays Jacob King, homicide detective with the Memphis Police Department. He's a tough cop who plays by his own rules etc, and he is so obsessed with his work he neglects his inexplicably hot, young girlfriend (who is also a cop). Because the film takes place in Memphis, Tennessee, Seagal gets to use his Southern voice (except when he uses a voice double), which sounds a lot like his ebonics voice except he says "lawd have mercy" a lot.

He also has frequent flashbacks to his traumatic childhood. We know it's traumatic because they use every disorienting editing trick they can think of... white flashes, skipped frames, creepy blue tints, switching up the film stock. I'm pretty sure they used every in-built feature on their editing software. You see, it seems that Seagal had a twin brother that was murdered at their childhood birthday party by some random psycho. Worst party ever. And don't expect the identity of the killer to play into the film in any way. It's what they like to call "characterisation" or more accurately "padding".

As the film opens the bomb squad are tending to a woman who has had a block of C4 implanted in her chest, and they've got to figure out which wire to cut before she explodes. It's like Die Hard in a woman! The culprit is a serial killer named Billy Joe Hill (Harry Heck, who played that singing assassin in The Punisher) who is watching from a nearby apartment building. Seagal kicks in the door and proceeds to beat the relevant information out of him, smashing him into walls, cupboards, pretty much every piece of balsa-wood furniture on the set. Seagal is smart enough to realise that when he tells them to cut the red wire he's lying, so he tells the Bomb Squad to cut the white wire instead and then tosses Billy Joe out of a third story window. Take that, due process!

Billy Joe survives, and eventually is let out of jail on a technicality (damn lefty judges) and continues his rampage, but he isn't the only villain. There's also a serial killer named Lazarus, who likes to carve astrological symbols in his victims and send Seagal cryptic messages. He also likes to walk around his fleabag apartment wearing nothing but a jockstrap, dress up like the Unabomber and scrawl mysterious writing on the walls. So, you know, he's like a greatest hits compilation of serial killer cliches. Also he beats a woman to death with a baby doll. Eventually Seagal manages to crack the code (they are simple substitution ciphers that Seagal should have been able to crack in about five minutes, let alone several library research montages) and tracks Lazarus down to a local rock club that plays shitty sub-Nickelback buttrock.

There's also a female FBI agent (and noted tight-shirt enthusiast) who is investigating the serial killings and Seagal himself, but she spends most of the time puking at crime scenes and being berated and belittled by Seagal and his friends. They are pretty rude to her, actually. I know there's that local cops/feds rivalry but let's keep it professional, guys. At one point Seagal's partner tells her a drawn-out anecdote (complete with flashback sequence) about a serial killer cannibal who they caught eating a clown. It's a long way to go for a really old joke, but I have to appreciate the ballsiness of dedicating an entire scene to such a minor gag.

Well, any Seagal film really comes down to the fight scenes and here they are pretty terrible. They are padded out mercilessly with lots of repeated footage and reversed shots. Typically Seagal will take down a bad guy in a few hits, here it takes a dozen or more and it's boring. Stunt doubles are used for everything, cut in with reaction shots from Seagal where he is clearly nowhere near the fight. Then there's the editing. Oh god, the editing. This film has some of the most obnoxious, quick-cut fight scenes I've ever seen. Seriously, this shit is worse than Michael Bay. Every single stunt is repeated three or four times with different angles and film speeds, and in the opening sequence when he throws Billy Joe through the window it replays about a dozen times! Not in a cool Jackie Chan "check this shit out" kind of way, more like somebody spilled a beer on the editing console. I thought my DVD player was fucked.

Although the fights are mostly unremarkable outside of the lousy editing, a few moments of brutality stick in my mind. The first is at a standard Seagalian bar fight where he curb stomps a guy on the edge of the bar until he spits out a mouthful of teeth and some information. Sure the guy seems to have all his teeth back a few moments later, but still, that's a little too Rodney King for my tastes (doesn't help that the dude is black either). The second is his big face off with the serial killer, where he tosses him into every shelf, table and pane of glass in the building before systematically breaking all his bones with a ball-peen hammer. And yeah, they shout "My teeth!" and "My arm!" respectively.

I'm not going to explain the plot because it's boring and doesn't make sense, but I really have to mention the ending. Through the entire film Seagal has been established as a well-known Memphis detective with a house, a girlfriend, a long-time partner etc. Well, after all the cases have been wrapped up, Seagal drives out into the country to a lovely villa and is greeted by a Russian woman and two children, apparently his wife and kids. He gives the two children presents and the woman leads him upstairs, strips naked and beckons him into their bedroom. The end. That is some David Lynch shit right there. So apparently he has a double life? Seriously, I don't know what the fuck.

The fucked-up ending, the voice doubles, the meandering plot, the padded fights, all of this really suggests some serious post-production shenanigans, Attack Force style. In fact there's one part where the FBI detective suggests that Seagal himself is responsible for the killings. The way this is so casually tossed off near the end of the film makes me wonder if this wasn't a very different film to start with. Apparently Seagal wrote the script so it would be interesting to see how it all started, but I guess we'll never know.

After Pistol Whipped and Urban/Renegade Justice I was excited to see what would come next but this film is a lazy cinematic abortion, easily a step back into Attack Force/Submerged territory. Like those films it has it's share of enjoyable WTF moments, but they don't come frequently enough to distinguish it from the rest of Seagal's Direct-to-Video flotsam.

Against the Dark (2007)

I wonder how many cows had to die to make
Seagal that leather jacket?

Seagal is... Against the Dark. And by "dark" they mean vampires. Yes, that's right: Seagal vs vampires. Kind of sells itself doesn't it? However, it's not the first time Seagal has attempted to dip his feet into the realm of the supernatural. In Attack Force and Submerged Seagal was supposed to be fighting aliens and biological mutants respectively, but whether the result of cold feet or studio meddling they pussed out and switched it over to terrorists at the last minute. This time however, the film promises Seagal versus vampires and it delivers. Sort of.

You see, these vampires are treated more like biological mutants than immortal bloodsuckers. It's more of a 28 Days Later kind of thing where it's a highly contagious virus and while the infected do drink blood they also tear people up and eat their flesh like zombies. Sometimes they are mindless zombies, other times they are smart enough to set traps or string people up and drain their blood (into an "Allergic to Mondays" mug, nice touch). Although it's repeatedly mentioned that it's more dangerous to go out at night they never explain why or even if daylight has any effect on them at all. For all we know they glitter in the sun like Twilight emo vampires. No crosses, no garlic, nothing like that. They get killed by swords and guns just like normal humans. Fuck, I don't know why they are called vampires at all, now that I think about it. They don't even have fangs, they have to file their teeth down manually.

So in this film Seagal plays Tao, leader of a group of bad-ass vampire hunters. They seem to work for the military, but they are rugged individualists so they all wear leather trenchcoats, carry swords, walk in slo-mo, etc. The sort of thing that would have been pretty awesome about ten years ago but now looks pretty cheesy. Seagal kills a few vampires here and there but his role is mainly to slur military orders and occasionally interject with some nonsense like "We're not here to decide who's right or wrong... we're here to decide who lives or dies", which makes even less sense in context. In one scene he rescues a kid who asks who he is and he replies "My name is Tao" and turns away as some rockin' guitars kick in, as if we are supposed to be blown away by his badassery. I don't know man, I don't think you've earned those guitars just yet. Maybe start with a kazoo and work your way up. The rest of his team aren't much more interesting, although there's one beefy guy named Tanoai Reed who is pretty cool. Apparently he's the Rock's stunt double so he's pretty imposing physically and he gets to jump around with some wrist blades and throw vampires around. I reckon he could have pulled off the guitars.

The problem is that we don't see Seagal and his team that much at all. Nintey percent of the time is spent with a large group of survivors who are wandering around in an abandoned hospital. They were all so uninteresting that I couldn't keep their names straight or remember what they were doing or why. Apparently they have to find the hospital exit before the generator runs out and the security doors get locked permanently, but they don't seem to be in any rush to do so. They keep getting separated and splitting up into groups for no reason. When they come across a locked door they just shrug and move on instead of finding something to bash it open. They don't even carry any weapons. Eventually they meet with Seagal and his team, but until then you are stuck watching these dipshits wandering around like a flock of fucking sheep. Protip: If a woman or a child is curled up crying in the corner with their back to you he/she is probably a vampire.

I'm struggling for things to say here because this is one of those shot-in-Romania Sci-Fi-channel-caliber movies that dissolves from your brain immediately after viewing. There was something about an evil scientist who kidnapped one of them to feed to his infected daughter I believe. He says something about her having the capacity for reason and being the next step in evolution but Seagal puts an abrupt end to that plot point by impaling her head with a sword (offscreen unfortunately). They also stuck in a few scattered pieces of I Am Legend style "we are the real monsters" introspection from both the survivors and the monsters, but they didn't go anywhere either. There's a fair bit of blood and gore if you're into that, but nothing special.

The great Keith David and Linden Ashby turn up for a day of shooting as military officers who are trying to get Seagal and his team out before they level the building in an air strike. It's never explained why this air strike is necessary and Seagal never shares screen time or interacts with them in any way so it's largely pointless. They already have a time limitation with the security doors, so all this impending air strike adds is a few minutes of padding and an utterly wasted character actor.

The proceedings are directed with a minimum of flair by first-and-likely-only-time director Richard Crudo, who was cinematographer on Pistol Whipped, Out of Reach and a bunch of other films that don't star Steven Seagal. If I had to say anything good about this film it's that I could usually see everything that was going on even though it was in darkness a lot of the time. You know, cause it's him Against the Dark. Other than that, I can't recommend anything about it. Kind of like Hasselhoff versus giant snakes, this is another one that's much better in theory than execution. I was hoping for vampires in a Seagal film but I got Seagal in a pseudo-vampire film. Oh well. At least he threw a vampire through a window.

Today You Die (2005)

Treach hangs his head in shame at Seagal's
mangled attempts at street slang

Although I've watched most of Seagal's Direct-to-Video efforts, Today You Die is one of the few entries that managed to slip through the cracks. It's the first team-up between director Don E. FauntLeRoy and Seagal, which would be followed by Mercenary for Justice the following year and Urban/Renegade Justice the next (I guess he's big on justice). It's another Seagal/rapper team-up, trying to recapture the questionable magic of Exit Wounds. First it was DMX, then Ja Rule and now Naughty By Nature's Treach. Wow, it's been a while since I heard anything about Naughty By Nature. I guess MC Hammer is next.

In this one Seagal plays Harlan Banks, a Robin Hood kind of thief who steals from "scumbag drug dealers" and gives to the poor. His latest robbery goes tits up when a gang of crooks interrupt him (not the owners of the house, some different guys) and Seagal is forced to kill/maim about half a dozen guys. His foxy young wife Jada (Mari Morrow) is understandably worried about his line of employment and wants him to go straight, so he takes a legitimate job in Vegas driving an armoured car. On the way to he drives past a childrens' hospital that has a "Going Out of Business" sign plastered over it like it's a shoe store or something. A sad nun wheels a little girl into the street, presumably to dump her into the gutter. You can't tell from his expression, but I think this makes Seagal sad.

He probably should have been suspicious about this "legit" job, since they didn't ask for references or do a background check or anything, plus his boss Max (Kevin Tighe) is obviously evil. During their first pickup Seagal's co-worker Bruno (Robert Miano) kills a couple of guards and forces him to drive off with 20 million in stolen cash. This leads up to an impressive-for-Direct-to-Video car chase with cop cars crashing, exploding and flipping through the air. Seagal wrecks the van and stumbles away, leaving the unconscious Bruno to get picked up by the cops. Eventually the cops pick up Seagal as well, but he manages to hide the money before he is captured. Seagal refuses to tell the cops where the money is and gets dumped in prison.

After he takes out a couple of 'roided up guys in the prison yard, he attracts the attention of top dog Ice Kool (Treach), and Seagal agrees to share the hidden loot with him if he's allowed to tag along on an extremely convenient helicopter-based jail break. After an uneventful escape they pick up some weapons from a blind guy named Dinky-D, who remarks that Seagal "walks like a black man, breathes like a killer"). Seagal and Treach then bond over a series of poorly motivated shootouts and fights with Max's men. There's a bit where they sit in their car make fun of a guy's walk and imply that he was a "prison bitch", seems pretty homophobic. Come on Seagal, what would Forrest Taft say? Most of their banter seems weird and stilted and sounds improvised. Between Treach's so-called "G-bonics" and Seagal's weird attempts at street slang (he sounded more like a Southern preacher most of the time; "Ice cool, y'all!") I was thankful for the English subtitles.

Pretty standard stuff so far, but the film differs from the rest of the pack in that it has a slight supernatural bent. In fact, the film starts with Jada visiting a Tarot card reader. She always has these dreams/psychic visions and whether they're sitting in bed together or yapping on the phone (both of which occur surprisingly frequently in the film), she's always rambling on and on about mausoleums and French writing and little girls and that Max is "not of this world". Seagal dismisses her visions, saying that dreams are purely symbolic and don't mean anything. He's wrong about them being symbolic (they are, in fact, absurdly literal) but he's right about them not meaning anything because they have no bearing on the plot whatsoever, except maybe the scene where Seagal finally confronts Max.

You see, when Seagal faces Max (who up until this point was assumed dead by the cops, and it's never explained why he's still alive) he's sitting at a piano surrounded by skeletons and candles all the other spooky stuff from Jada's dreams. He says "I was born with the devil inside me." and makes a weird speech about innocence and power and as he fondles a photo of some little girl (I think the one in the wheelchair from earlier). Admittedly there was a weird line earlier where a cop calls Max a "lowlife freak who dabbles in black magic", but this is a weird twist, especially since his black magic doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the film.

Another way in which this film is unique is that Seagal plays a pretty different character from normal. He's a thief (probably ex-CIA, but it's never mentioned) and while he does have the Robin Hood thing going on, he's not squeamish about killing/injuring anyone who gets in his way. There's a bit in a car where, after getting the information he needs, Seagal pretends he's going to let a guy go and then shoots him. Then he makes a quip to Treach about him having committed suicide and blows up the car. That's pretty cold.

There's also the issue of the stolen money, which Seagal has no problem taking (not that we find out where he hid it) even though it's clearly not the property of "scumbag drug dealers". He does give some of it to that children's hospital, but from the look of the "Grand Re-opening" I doubt he gave them the whole 20 million. By the way, the little girl in the photo is at the party for the hospital re-opening and Seagal shows up to give her necklace and a hug. The film ends with him sitting in his car and saying "I think she's going to be alright." Huh? Who the fuck is she? I doubt it's random kid, the way he talks to her gives me the impression that we are supposed to know who she is.

Considering the amount of plot holes, it's not surprising that there were all sorts of production problems on set. Apparently Seagal was difficult to work with, showing up late on set and leaving early. Stunt doubles are used liberally. A fight in a mansion is shot almost entirely with Seagal's head out of frame. It gets kind of surreal after a while, like they're fighting the headless horseman. Also, Millenium Films raided their back-catalogue for stock footage. That car chase I said was impressive? Taken from 1998's Top of the World with Peter Weller.

There's really not much else to say about this one. It's just another apathetic entry in a string of Direct-to-Video films that average somewhere below "competent" on a scale of quality. It's better than Submerged and Black Dawn but worse than Into the Sun, making it the second best Seagal film of 2005. So at least it takes home the silver medal.

Out for Justice (1991)

Jerry Orbach as the Police Captain?
It's like I'm watching the best episode of Law and Order ever.

Watching all these Direct-to-Video Steven Seagal films have got me nostalgic for early Seagal. Really though, were those early Seagal films any good? Nostalgia is a funny thing, it's like a beautiful woman who beckons you near and then kicks you in the balls eleven times and throws you down a flight of stairs. Well, to answer that question I dug out Seagal's fourth (and arguably best) film, Out for Justice. Surprisingly it's good, real good. It's fast paced (none of that plot or characterisation bullshit), well choreographed and incredibly violent. Everything that I want out of an action film.

Let's get this out of the way: Seagal's character is named Gino Felino. That's not the name of an action hero, it's the name of a pizza chain mascot. I mean, if you're going to have such a ridiculous stereotype of a name, then you'd better earn it. To his credit, Seagal does try to speak a little Italian, but his accent drifts in and out so much you don't even notice he's supposed to have one until he says "Ey!". Anyway, he's the son of a poor Italian immigrant who grew up on the streets and became a cop, so he knows pretty much everybody in the area. As the film opens he fucks up a bust by intervening when a pimp (who also knows him by name) starts beating up one of his girls. He tosses the guy through a windshield. Nice opening.

Soon after, Seagal's partner, Bobby Lupo (heh), is gunned down in front of his wife and child in broad daylight by a small-time thug called Richie Madano (William Forsythe). The movie follows Seagal's attempt to find Richie before he can do much more damage. And uh, yeah, that's pretty much it. Richie is a pretty interesting bad guy, because he isn't some big-time mafia crime boss, he's just a psychopathic hoodlum. In fact, the mafia are also trying to track down Richie because he is making them look bad. After gunning Bobby down in broad daylight, Richie knows he's dead anyway, so he has decided to have one last night on the town. This involves a lot of "partying" (ie sleeping with hookers) and gunning down angry female motorists, wheelchair-bound henchmen and anyone else who looks at him funny. This was long before the videogame Grand Theft Auto, so he doesn't have a safe outlet for those kind of impulses. His henchmen are pretty worried about his behaviour, but they stick around because they've been promised a room full of cash and drugs if they last the night.

Unfortunately for Richie, despite his murderous tendencies he's not much of a fighter. When he finally has his showdown with Seagal, it's so one-sided that you almost feel sorry for him. Richie keeps grabbing whatever weapons are at hand and every time Seagal just plucks it from his hands and turns it against him. He does everything short of that Three Stooges routine where you hold his head at arm's length and he just pinwheels his arms. Seagal finally dispatches Richie with a corkscrew, embedding it in his head right down to the hilt. That's a pretty difficult feat, he didn't twist it or anything. It would have been better if he'd then used it to pluck out a cork-shaped chunk of his head, or even his eyeball, but you can't have everything.

Seagal's films have a tendency towards unnecessary dubbing, where a (usually offscreen) extra will spell out something for the dumbshits in the audience (most of them). Often this will be a bystander making awestruck comments about Seagal's skills during a fight, but in this film it's used for bad guys to explain their injuries. One guy shouts out "You knocked my teeth out!" after spitting a mouthful of teeth onto a pool table. Another guy shouts "My balls!" after receiving a mighty crotch-kick. Another guy gets his leg severed by a shotgun blast (!) and proceeds to shout "My leg! You took my leg!" for a good minute straight (he didn't take it anywhere, man, it's right there on the ground). This makes Out for Justice the perfect action film to share with your vision-impaired friends.

In fact, the vision-impaired will have the added bonus of not having to view Seagal's ridiculous ensembles. At the beginning of the film he opts for a sleeveless vest/beret combo (all black, naturally). Later on he goes for a billowy black shirt with a plunging neck and accessorises with gold chains. His ponytail is looking particularly long and lustrous, while the ladies sport a variety of enormous early 90s hair-don'ts. It's cheap to insult the fashion of 80s/90s movies, but I can't imagine Seagal's outfits looking good in any era.

Seagal's movies usually feature a bar fight of some kind, and this one is a doozy. He walks straight in to Richie's brother's bar and starts intimidating everyone in the room, goading people into attacking him and then taking them out in a single punch. When he has had enough he straight-up wrecks the joint. He uses a few different weapons, including a pool ball wrapped up in a piece of cloth. He takes on a guy named Sticks who is pretty good with a couple of pool cues (you see what they did there?). He's the only Asian dude in the whole bar, so when you see him at the beginning of the scene you know he's going to do something awesome. Seagal takes him out no problem, though.

Seagal does come off as a little unhinged in this scene, though. I mean, just imagine you're one of these guys in the bar. You don't know Richie Madano, you're just here you're in here enjoying a beer after putting in ten hours at the smelting plant. Suddenly this cop just walks in and starts flashing his badge around and smashing up the joint. He even knocks your beer across the room and throws your friend in a phone booth (twice). What an asshole! I don't know if this was supposed to illustrate how our thirst for revenge robs us of our humanity, but if they followed up on that bit I must have dozed off. There's another great fight in a butcher shop where a guy gets his hand pinned to the wall by a meat cleaver and another guy gets knocked out by a sausage. Smallgoods as a deadly weapon, don't see that too often.

One thing about this movie is that it maintains a pretty grim tone throughout. There's no cheesy one-liners. The only comic relief is a sub-plot where Seagal rescues a puppy in a sack that some asshole throws out of his car window. The animal abuse isn't the comedy part, that comes later. Seagal makes a comment about hoping to run into this guy again, and sure enough he runs into him at the end of the film and gives him a kick in the balls. The puppy takes a leak on his face, everyone laughs (except me), roll credits. This scene seems pretty out of place, and is probably the result of studio meddling. Apart from this, though, this is a top notch Seagal film and a pretty solid action film overall. I think all the action directors today, with their choppy-editing and close-ups, could learn a thing or two from films like this.

Renegade Justice (2007)

It's hard to make out, but this is Seagal kicking a guy in the nuts eleven times

I was looking for this film at the video rental store for a while, but I couldn't find it on the shelves. I figured that even Seagal wasn't above the law of diminishing returns, and it was no longer profitable to ship his films all the way to Australia. However, it turns out I was only looking under the wrong title. Seems that somewhere between the US and Australia the name was changed from Urban Justice to Renegade Justice, presumably because the word "urban" doesn't have the same ethnic connotation here.

Seagal plays Simon Ballister, a man with a mysterious past (duh) who seeks revenge after his son Max is murdered in an apparent gang shooting. You could say he's Out for Justice, but that would be a terrible film-title pun so please don't. Plus it's not even accurate. Seagal admits himself that his quest is all about vengeance. He just wants to kill the guy who pulled the trigger, he doesn't care who ordered the hit. So he rents a fleabag apartment in the scummiest area of LA and proceeds to bust all manner of heads as he tracks down his son's killer. That's pretty much it. No double-crosses, no CIA shenanigans, just a straight-forward revenge plot. Refreshingly simple compared to some of Seagal's recent convoluted offerings.

Seagal's mysterious past is never made clear, although at one point he claims to be not quite a cop and at another point not quite a soldier. Maybe he's a mechanic, since the damage sustained to his vehicle in a car chase is completely repaired by the next day. Continuity nitpicks aside, this film might come off a little racist if it was just about Seagal rolling into town and beating up every black guy and Mexican that comes within arms reach. Fortunately he does some other things to balance the equation such as saving a kid from a gang of skinheads. Also, the bad guy turns out to be a (white) crooked cop. I guess I should put a spoiler warning, but if you can't solve that brainbuster within a few seconds of seeing the guy then you haven't seen too many Seagal films. Good for you.

Eddie Griffin plays Armand Tucker, the head gangster. He's a pretty funny stereotype, sitting around with a bunch of women in his expensive apartment, quoting Scarface. What is it with these gangster types and Scarface? Did the point of the movie go over their heads? Is there a special Gangster Cut where Tony Montana survives the massacre and lives a long and happy life on a pile of money, cocaine and bitches? Anyway, for all his money he seems pretty cheap, because it a lot of his gangsters seem to share the same Lincoln town car. Maybe he got a bunch of them on a fleet discount, who knows. Although they put his face on the box, Danny Trejo is in the film for all of five minutes as a rival gang leader. Good job on that cover art, by the way, they'll never tell you MS-Painted Seagal's bloated mug (complete with creepy widow's peak) onto someone else's body, unless they have functioning eyes.

One thing you could fault most of Seagal's recent films for is a lack of action, but this film delivers. There a large number of fist-fights in this film and they are fast and brutal, with stunt doubles kept to a minimum. There is a lot of camera and editing trickery, you'll never mistake it for Out for Justice Seagal, but it's good to see a film where Seagal does something other than walking and talking. The film also features several bloody gunfights, and I do mean that literally. Every time someone is shot, a double-stuffed squib shoots a geyser of blood ten feet in the air. Almost every bullet goes right through the body so they can have double the amount of blood spray. I approve of this level of tasteless and gratuitous violence, even though it rarely makes sense.

I am (technically) a man, so like all men I derive a sick thrill from watching someone getting kicked in the balls. You can imagine my delight when Seagal kicks a guy in the balls eleven times. Eleven times! Then he kicks him in the face and throws him down a staircase. I can imagine the sweet release of unconsciousness (possibly death) would have come as a relief after that punishment. Nothing will top the Marked for Death trifecta of being eye-gouged, back-broken and tossed down an elevator shaft, but eleven successive ball-kicks is pretty good. Seagal also breaks a bunch of random bones and even breaks the neck of some goon after he loses consciousness. That's pretty cold, I think I'd like to see Seagal breaking bones of unconscious opponents more often. He also says "motherfucker" a lot in this movie. I mean, a lot. On the plus side, it's him actually saying it, not some random guy dubbing him.

Renegade Justice is the third Don E. FauntLeRoy/Seagal film, the previous being 2006's Mercenary for Justice. I'm not sure if Seagal's character in that film was for Renegade Justice or just the regular type, or how this relates to the (as descriped by Lance Henriksen) "Extra-Curricular Justice" Seagal's character distributed in Pistol Whipped. Anyway this film is definitely the best Don E. FaultLeRoy/Seagal film out of the two I've seen and probably the best Direct-to-Video Seagal film in recent memory. Renegade Justice: Surprisingly competent. Good job!

Seagal Bloatwatch Threat Level: Elevated. He's not at his fattest here (I think Out of Reach was probably the high point) but he's big, which they try to conceal with his usual brown leather trench coats. Seagal's Windsor glasses (featured prominently in The Patriot) make a special guest appearance as well. They also surround him with morbidly obese gangsters so he looks thinner by comparison.

Pistol Whipped (2007)

Well, at least there are no naked women in the tank.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but Seagal's getting pretty old and fat. I know you don't want to believe it, but you know in your heart that it's true. No amount of Seagalian squinting is going to turn John Seeger from Mercenary for Justice into Gino Felino from Out for Justice. Consequently, it's getting harder and harder to buy him as an invincible bad-ass. Fortunately, Seagal takes a pretty refreshing turn here in Pistol Whipped. Seagal plays Matt (just Matt, short for "dumb, unlucky son of a bitch" according to Seagal), a washed-up, alcoholic ex-cop. He gambles, he womanises and he neglects his daughter. It doesn't get too grim and gritty, he doesn't stick a gun in his mouth or pass out in his own vomit in a back alley, but he's definitely a haunted man who's past has caught up with him.

It seems that many years ago some cash evidence was stolen and Seagal, already a womanising, gambling drunkard by this point, took the fall. Seagal now spends his nights drinking himself stupid and losing all his money at high stakes poker games that take place in the lobby of a theater for some reason. After losing the last of his cash to some shady characters, he is approached by a fellow named Blue (Paul Caulderon). He takes him to a run-down movie theater (I guess they were short on shooting locations) to meet a mysterious figure known only as the Old Man (Lance Henriksen in an extended cameo). The Old Man offers to pay off his considerable gambling debts in exchange for performing a series of assassinations. He claims to work for the government, taking care of criminals that have become "not just above the law, but beyond it", thus establishing this film as spiritual successor to Above the Law. He calls their operation "Extra-curricular Justice".

I've seen a lot of Direct-to-Video Seagal, I'm used to unmotivated double-crosses and shifting allegances, but these guys are something else. First they're telling him he doesn't have to do it if he doesn't want to, then they're threatening him at gunpoint and telling him he doesn't have a choice. Then when he accepts, Blue gets the boot in by telling him his targets have families just like him. I mean, come on, do you want him to do it or not? His first target is some mafia asshole who is rude to women, so you don't feel bad when Seagal shoots him in the head. Seagal takes him out in the middle of a crowded restaurant, stabbing his henchmen with silverware and making a huge mess. The Old Man hired Seagal because he was highly skilled in silent assassination, a "ghost". Doesn't seem like the actions of a ghost to me, unless it's some sort of violent, crazy ghost, like the one in Poltergeist. I guess he's out of practice.

It's a refreshing change to see Seagal playing someone so vulnerable. Even Seagal's mumbling style of non-acting works in his favour, making him seem nervous and uncomfortable, a man who is ashamed of himself. Of course, all of that goes out the window when a hot, young woman named Drea hits on him in a bar. A couple of smooth moves later ans her clothes are scattered on the floor of his house next to Seagal's 4XL shirt. She's working for the Old Man obviously and the fact that Seagal doesn't pick up on this straight away makes him seem desperate and kind of pathetic (not sure if that was intentional). However, as she points out later in the film, she totally wanted to do him anyway (or give him some "good lovin'" as Seagal puts it). She even implies that he has a huge dick over breakfast the next morning, which is a bit more information than I needed to know.

So everything seems to be going pretty well. He even begins to learn how to balance his assassination job with his fatherhood responsibilities. Unfortunately, things takes a turn for the worse when he is asked to kill his daughter's step-father. If the thought of moral ambiguity in a Seagal film has you breaking out in a cold sweat, you needn't worry, turns out (spoiler ahead) that he is actually a corrupt bastard, and even worse, he was the one who engineered Seagal's frame-up and fall from grace. This twist comes out of nowhere and makes no sense whatsoever. Up until now he has been presented as a great father and husband, everything Seagal could and should have been. He's even been really nice to Seagal, doing him favours and covering for him when he bails on his daughter. As soon as the twist is revealed he goes out and kills the kindly priest who provides Seagal with spiritual guidance, and by the end of it he even holds his own step-daughter hostage. Oh well.

The film's climax takes place in a cemetery during the priest's funeral. Steve and his boys plan on taking out Seagal when he comes to pay his respects, which is not really appropriate behaviour at a funeral if you ask me. There's a pretty good gunfight, with lots of slow motion, bloody squibs etc. It's no John Woo, but it's violent and exciting. Drea plays sniper on the roof of a mausoleum and even Blue lends them a hand. Eventually Seagal manages to take out Steve and just before he dies Seagal asks him whether he'd like to be cremated or buried. He says "buried" so Seagal blows up a car and roasts his corpse. "You're cremated now, motherfucker!" Ouch. We can only guess what would he have done if Steve had asked to be cremated. Seagal's little girl watches the car go up in flames and starts screaming and crying. I felt pretty bad, I imagine that seeing your father murder your step-father in cold blood would be a pretty traumatic experience, but it turns out she was only upset because she thought Seagal might have been hurt. Phew, close call. Seagal ends up back together with his ex-wife, which isn't really surprising because she's been on the verge of making out with him every time they met. The film ends with Drea approaching him in a church with another assassination mission (a reference to The Killer, maybe?). Apparently the target's is the director, which I think is a bit harsh. The film wasn't that bad.

So basically Seagal looks pretty fat and old in this film. It fits with the character, but they still pull out as many tricks as they can think of to disguise his weight. He wears all of his shirts untucked (Seagal's parade of ugly shirts continues unabated) and his leather jackets zipped up with his hands in the front pockets. The dude in charge of airbrushing the DVD cover must have worn his stylus down to a nub: Seagal looks like he's made out of plastic. Despite all this, Seagal does take part in a number of fight scenes that prove that while he may not still have it, he's got visitation rights with it every second Saturday. He punches, he stabs and he fires guns aimlessly. It's all good. Stunt double are kept to minimum and, shockingly, there doesn't seem to be any post-production dubbing. Hallelujah! It seems he's putting in the effort. In keeping with his more vulnerable character, he even gets injured at one point by a bullet in the arm. Of course, by the end of the film his injury is forgotten about, but it's the thought that counts. Director Roel Reine employs a few too many fancy camera moves for my taste, but the action is reasonably coherent. There's also a decent car chase, even if it is marred by some Black Dawn quality green-screen.

I wouldn't say that Pistol Whipped is Seagal's Rocky Balboa, but it's hard not to see the parallels between this film and his movie career. Like his character's career in the Force, Seagal's movie career started out promising with a trilogy of solid action films but as his box office draw increased the films became more impersonal. Unfortunately, the more personal films that followed were colossal failures, much like the poor personal choices his character made in this film. After getting banished to Direct-to-DVD, the movie career equivalent of getting kicked off the Force, he fell in with shady characters like Michael Keusch and Don E. FauntLeRoy and wallowed in rushed, poor quality films. He neglected his responsibilities to us, his fans, but with this film it seems like Seagal is finally making an effort. He's trying to redeem himself, kicking his twin habits of post-production dubbing and stunt doubles. My analogy is running out of steam, but what I'm trying to say is that this is a good indication of what we can expect from Seagal in the future, I hope he'll still be manhandling goons and breaking wrists at 72, like Charles Bronson in Death Wish V.

Half Past Dead (2002)

Yes, this is Seagal making his anguish face in a do-rag.
Cinema doesn't get any better than this.

In the early 2000's, Andrzej Bartkowiak directed a trilogy of ridiculous action films with stupid names. In some sort of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup style experiment, they teamed up established martial artists with rappers. It worked out well and the films were mildly successful. While Jet Li was the martial arts draw in Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave, Seagal filled the role in Exit Wounds. I don't know, if I was Jet Li I'd be insulted. Seagal was way past his prime by this point. I suppose Half Past Dead was an attempt to recapture the magic, this time with Ja Rule instead of DMX and Kurupt as an added bonus comedy relief character. The title is certainly as stupid as any of Bartkowiak's films. I kept expecting a villain to ask Seagal for the time and him to whisper "It's half past DEAD!" and break his neck, but it never happened.

Seagal plays Sasha Petrosevitch, a Russian car thief who may or may not be an undercover FBI agent. He doesn't affect a Russian accent, the closest he gets is a cultural exchange with his partner Nick Frazier (Ja Rule) where he learns how to say "a'ight". I'm the whitest whitey ever, so I have no idea if Ja Rule's rhymes are fresher than DMX's or whatever, but he's certainly not as charismatic an actor. After crime boss Sonny "I've got a big wart on my forehead that's really distracting" Eckvall (Richard Bremmer) forces Seagal to take a lie detector test to prove he's not an undercover cop, he's hired along with Nick to steal a fancy sports car. Seagal treats the car pretty rough, leaping it so high that he scrapes the roof on an overhanging sign, before screeching to a halt and flinging his partner out of the passenger door, ten feet through the air and into the windshield of another car. This is Seagal's idea of a funny prank. Anyway, they are immediately raided by FBI agents, and in the ensuing gun battle Seagal is injured when he tries to save Nick. Seagal has a near death experience (hence the title) where he has visions of his dead wife.

Cut to some time later and Seagal and Nick are being transferred to the futuristic prison of New Alcatraz. It's the grand opening and while one of the reporters complain that the new prison is a step backwards in criminal warehousing, it looks alright to me. If anything it's a bit too lenient. The chief warden wears a leather jacket, calls himself El Fuego and he calls the inmates by gang-friendly terms such as "esé" and "homes". He lets them have Playstations in their cells, use power tools, he even lets Seagal and beat up a prison guard with no repurcussions. Just to get his aggression out, you know? I don't know, that seems like the kind of stuff that prisoners would take advantage of. Luckily the prison population consists pretty much entirely of lovable scoundrels, so nothing really goes wrong. Hell, there's a death row train robber named Lester who is practically angelic. He derailed the train and killed some Federal Marshalls, but it was an accident so it's okay to root for him. Because he's being such a good sport about this execution thing, El Fuego grants his last wish to spend his final hour chatting to Seagal. Who could blame him, that would be my wish too.

Seagal drinks tea with him in a cool glass-walled room with computer generated scenery on the walls. It's pretty fancy, and when your time is up the electric chair rises up dramatically out of the floor like it's Iron Chef or something. They should add some smoke, maybe some fireworks and dramatic orchestral music. Lester wants to talk about Seagal's near death experience (I don't know how he found out about that) but Seagal is pretty vague and tight-lipped about it. You'd think Seagal would at least humour him. Anyway, it turns out he hid the proceeds of his train robbery in a secret location, and the feds have been trying to get the information out of him. One of the FBI guys even interrogates him at gunpoint while he's sitting in the electric chair, right in front of the Supreme Court Justice. Pretty unprofessional. Before they pull the switch and fry Lester, a bunch of well-armed crooks parachute into New Alcatraz and take him prisoner with the hopes of forcing him to lead them to the hidden treasure. I should add that they kill about a dozen prison guards and let out all the prisoners (pretty stupid move on their part, actually) over the course of fifteen minutes, and nobody in the execution chamber is even notified. When their evac helicopter crashes into the roof of the prison, the crooks are forced to take everyone hostage and negotiate with the FBI for their escape.

The bad guys call themselves "49er One" through to "49er Twelve", with 49er One being the big cheese. His real name is Don Johnson (he doesn't wear a white suit or shoes without socks or anything) and he is actually one of the guys in charge of the prison. He is played by Morris Chestnut, last seen with Seagal in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, where he played the comic relief sidekick. Here he plays lead villain, a respectable step up. Usually a character like this would have some beef with the government, but here he is just a sociopathic asshole who likes money. Nia Peeples plays a woman in shiny skin-tight vinyl and a floor length trenchcoat (49er something, I can't remember). She does a few flips and dual wields pistols. She's basically the budget Trinity. Seriously though, the bright blue eyeshadow? Doesn't work. That kind of crazy, over-the-top makeup can work really well on a villian (eg Lola in Transporter 2), but that colour looks terrible on you. You're really more of an autumn. She utters a couple of lines but she's basically mute for the whole film. The rest of the bad guys are your standard goons.

After doing the Die Hard thing for a while, Seagal ends up negotiating with 49er One to swap Lester for the Supreme Court Justice. Seagal knows he can't take them all on himself, but luckily the prisoners are housed right next to a room filled with machine guns and explosives. Kurupt blasts the gate with a bazooka (propelling him ten feet backwards and through a window... comedy!) and pretty soon all the prisoners are gearing up for a final battle. There's no power struggles or infighting or anything. They all just step in line behind Seagal. A huge gunfight follows, with Seagal and Nick manning the machine gun in the cockpit of the crashed helicopter, but after the hostages are exchanged we find that the bad guys have pulled a fast one, it's not the Supreme Court Justice at all, just some woman.

Luckily Seagal pulled some tricks of his own. Lester has decked himself out in a suicide bomber vest and once the Seagal performs a mid-air, sky-diving rescue of the Supreme Court Justice, he blows the bad guy's chopper sky high. That bit was pretty good, I must admit. Nick was supposedly killed during the gun battle, but at the end it's revealed that he survived and Seagal manages to pull some strings and get him out of prison early. There's a bit during the credits where Kurupt talks on a prison phone with his girl on the outside, which is funnier than any of the comic relief he did during the film.

There's also a lot of plot points that don't go anywhere. I mean, how can you specifically point out that Seagal has a titanium knee and then not have him knee someone in the balls (or skull) with a hilarious metallic "clang" sound. It's sloppy filmmaking. They also point out he's Russian, but he doesn't have any Russian mafia contacts or drink any vodka or anything. It doesn't figure into the film at all. There also might or might not be a bit in the film where Seagal is an undercover FBI agent who is trying to bust that crime boss Sonny Eckvall who killed his wife. He mentions that he'd captured the guy at the end but they don't even show it, it just feels tacked on. That is, it would feel tacked on if it were in the film. Which it might be, but I'm not saying either way.

There's some good over-the-top action, like when Seagal flips around a gun that's caught in a door, turning it on the bad guys. Seagal also has a mid-air fight with 49er One while they are both swinging on some chains, like on Gladiators. They are taking cues from the Matrix, so most of the fights are quite acrobatic, with lots of flips and people getting thrown about. Seagal is doubled for pretty much everything. There's some annoying editing tricks (skipped frames, slow-motion etc) but it's not too hard to follow what's going on. Unfortunately it really suffers from it's toned-down rating. There's lots of gunfights that try to ape John Woo. You've got your slow-motion leaping, your dual pistols (although I don't think FBI agents normally carry twin pistols in crossed-draw holsters), your sparks (oh God, do you ever have your sparks, it's like they're in a fireworks factory) but there isn't the sense of drama or tight choreography. Plus, it's pretty rare that somebody ever gets shot and when they are there isn't even any blood. It gets pretty ridiculous when you've got people standing about 5 meters apart, firing round after round and not hitting jack shit.

The soundtrack is a blend of techno, nu-metal and hip-hop. The bad guys get all the rockin' metal guitars while the good guys get the hip-hop. During the fight scenes they compromise on techno. Look filmmakers, if you're going to blank out all the swearing, don't include songs in the soundtrack that feature "motherfucker" as a prominent part of the lyrics. It's just common sense. Besides, you think all the kids who are going to see this film because of Ja Rule (most of them, probably) haven't heard the word "motherfucker" before? Those motherfuckers probably use the word "motherfucker" a hundred motherfucking times a day.

Needless to say, this film did not recapture the magic of Exit Wounds and instead was Seagal's last cinematic release, dooming him to Direct-to-Video. It was written and directed by some guy named Don Michael Paul and while I only listened to the first few minutes of his commentary, he was talking about fusing hip-hop and action like he was really breaking new ground. That ship has sailed, buddy, it's not even the first time Seagal explored this territory. After this film he wrote and directed 2007's Who's Your Caddy. I've never seen and I don't plan to, but apparently it's a comedy where a rapper and his entourage try to enter an exclusive golf club full of stuffy white conservatives, presumably hoeing the fertile comedic ground of white people acting like this, and black people acting like this. So it's good to see that he's still on the cutting edge.