Starring: Steven Seagal, Byron Mann, Monica Lo, Tom Wu,
Sarah Malakul Lane, Patrick Robinson, Vincent Riotta
Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung
Action Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung
In
between The Foreigner and Belly of the Beast, Steven Seagal made Out for a Kill. Out for a Kill was something of a hybrid effort, with The Foreigner’s Michael Oblowitz
returning to the director’s chair but with a Hong Kong veteran, Lau Chi Ho (The Big Hit and A Better Tomorrow III) handling the elaborate (by Seagal standards)
fight scenes. It thus served as a transition between the very European The Foreigner and this film, where
Seagal went full Hong Kong, from the Asian locations to the directing and
choreography style. Helming this was Ching Siu-Tung, best known for his 1990s wuxia films, the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy, and still basking in the success of Shaolin Soccer, which he choreographed.
He Who Snaps Wrists stars as Jake Hopper, a ninja-like CIA freelancer (which elicits both a “ha!” and a “yawn!”) who has retired to Hawaii to raise his daughter, Jessica (Sarah Malakul Lane, who’d go on to show up in Kickboxer: Vengeance and Sharktopus). While Jessica is on holiday with friends in Thailand, she’s set upon by a band of militants claiming to be part of an Islamic separatist group. When Hopper finds out, he makes a beeline to Bangkok to find out where she is before the rebels decide to kill her.
Hopper is immediately marked for death by unknown assailants, whom he assumes are working for the separtists. He ultimately hooks up with his old CIA buddy Sunti (Byron Mann, of Street Fighter and Invincible), who is doing penance at a Buddhist monastery for accidentally killing an innocent woman years before. They start questioning criminals and arms dealers based in Southeast Asia who might be selling guns to the rebels. A few shoot-outs later, Hopper begins to question just how much the Thai government knows about the kidnapping. And maybe the American nightclub owner, Fitch McQuaid (Vincent Riotta, of Shadow Man and An American Exorcism), is involved, if his cute assistant (Monica Lo, who had a bit role in Ching Siu-Tung’s Naked Weapon the year before) is to be believed.
Tony Ching Siu-Tung directs this with a sure hand and an eye for the absurd like he does in all his films. Ching rarely lets pass an opportunity to give the laws of physics the finger and have Seagal and company engage of crazy bouts of wire-fu or shoot down entire armies of villains, Rambo-style. Ching also incorporates black magic and Buddhist mysticism into the film, something that Hong Kong filmmakers have done with SE Asian since the 1970s. From the plethora of Snake Girl films in the 1970s to cult classics like The Centipede Horror and A Boxer’s Omen, Thailand (and its neighbors) has always been a hotspot for the occult, not too unlike how Hollywood might view Haiti and the Carribbean. It is Ching’s imagination and eye for visuals—after all, the man dominated Hong Kong fantasy from 1987 until 1993—that places this in the upper eschelon of Steven Seagal films, right up there with his early 90s output.
Seagal is his usual self here: if you hate his acting style, then stop expecting anything whenever you watch his movies. There’s no point in bitching about his increase in girth as the years passed, Ching Siu-Tung did not seem to care. He just did what he usually did when working with non-martial artists (see New Dragon Inn and the Heroic Trio films): use extensive doubles. Ching embraces that and has Seagal’s Hopper do all sorts of balletic footwork and jumping kicks that Seagal couldn’t even do when he was in his prime. If you’re going to use stunt doubles, you might as well have them earn their salary and then some.
There are a number of action sequences, which in part feel like Ching Siu-Tung rehashing his old work. Although given the Hollywood context, they do feel a lot fresher and polished than if it had been in another Hong Kong production. There are several gunfights, with as much blood spurting as your average John Woo production. The climatic mansion raid is reminiscent of the finale to A Better Tomorrow II, which Ching himself staged. We also get more martial arts than some of Seagal’s earlier films, which is welcome.
The first big fight scene occurs at a fish market, where Seagal fights off a bunch of men armed with machetes and meat cleavers. In addition to the aforementioned doubling, we also see that Ching has expanded Seagal’s repertoire by including Chinese internal martial arts, like tai chi chuan, in the fighting. I mean, you can only twist a guy’s wrist and flip him on his back so many times before it loses its novelty. Ching spices up the action with moments of creative violence, like Seagal sliding a guy across an ice-covered table headfirst into a meat cleaver.
The other fights are also interesting in their own way. In one sequence, Seagal and Mann fight off a bunch of sword wielding assassins who do all sorts of wire-assisted jumps and flips. It feels like the two stepped onto the set of a early 90s wuxia film. Seagal also tussles with a transsexual killer with super-long fingernails.
The big final fight is one of the most satisfying Seagal fights of them all, even if we know it’s not him doing most of that trademark Ching Siu-Tung balletic swordplay. Seagal fights with Tom Wu, of Shanghai Knights and Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes. The two engage in post-Matrix bullet-time gunplay before having a good ol’ fashioned kung fu weapons duel with katanas and spears. While Seagal’s ego often had him demanding to filmmakers that his character always be more powerful, Ching cleverly works around that by introducing the black magic angle, putting Seagal at a disadvantage.
While sex and nudity frequently showed up in Seagal’s earlier movies, it was once he reached the DTV phase that it practically became a staple of his movies and took on a particularly creepy dimension. Seagal was already fifty years old by this point, and his insistence in stuffing his films with T&A, often to the point where he’s sleeping with girls young enough to be his daughter, makes you wonder if he’s not just a dirty old man[1]. In The Foreigner, the sleaze was limited to a scene early on when we see Seagal’s French girlfriend walking around in revealing lingerie. In Out for a Kill, we see lots of naked prostitutes whenever the characters walk through Sofia, Bulgaria’s red light district.
In Belly of the Beast, the opening credits are placed across the body of some random woman as she’s skinning dipping in a pool. Seagal at one point does take actress Monica Lo to bed, despite her not being too much older than his daughter. In Seagal’s defense, many of Ching Siu-Tung’s directorial efforts feature sex scenes—A Chinese Ghost Story; Swordsman II; Naked Weapon; An Empress and the Warrior—so I shouldn’t put it all on Seagal. But it is worth nothing. We also have a random scene set a strip club, because no movie set in Thailand would complete without a strip club or some character playing prostitute. And then the kicker: Seagal learns of the separatists’ hiding place through a mysterious woman who leads him into a room, where she removes her top and pours water on her breasts, thus revealing the location written in magic marker. I mean, was that really necessary? But at least Ching Siu-Tung got an interesting visual out of it, right? Right?[1] - That would go double once you
consider that several actresses, including Jenny McCarthy, called out Seagal
for sleazy behavior once the @MeToo wave started in 2018.
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