Black Dawn (2005)

Black Dawn (2005)
Aka: The Foreigner 2; Foreigner 2: Black Dawn; The Foreigner: Black Dawn

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Tamara Davies, John Pyper-Ferguson, Julian Stone, Nicholas Davidoff, Roman Varshavsky, Noa Hegesh
Director: Alexander Gruszynski
Action Director: Dickey Beer, Mike Smith

 

One of the few Seagal films to have a sequel, Black Dawn was filmed as The Foreigner 2, but somewhere along the line decided to change the title. I suppose they did not want to sully the “reputation” of the first movie, which was fair at best. This one, however, struggles to keep its nose above “poor” waters.

Seagal returns as Jonathan Cold, who is now back with the CIA, albeit with a super-secret branch that’s so secret that senior agents and their bosses don’t know about it. The movie opens with Seagal springing an arms dealer, Michael Donovan (Julian Stone, who has spent his career doing “Additional Voices” for animated films and video games), from the joint. Donovan and his brother, James (John Pyper-Ferguson, of Drive and Tekken), are brokering a multi-million dollar deal with some Chechen terrorists in order to get them a small nuclear weapon, which they plan on detonating in downtown Los Angeles.

What none of them know is that the “mainstream” CIA is on to them, led by Agent Stuart (Project Viper’s Tamara Davies). What Stuart does not know is that there is a second group of agents following the case, but these guys are corrupt—the film never completely explains why they are. Stuart is also Jonathan Cold’s protégé, so when her cover is blown and she gets captured, he’ll have to blow his own cover to protect her. Together, they will have to race against times to stop the Chechens from blowing up one of America’s biggest metropolitan areas.

Scott Hamilton, writer for the now-defunct website Stomp Tokyo, discussed this movie on an episode of “The Cult Movies Podcast” and mentioned that Seagal movies of this period had storylines that were either cribbed from episodes of the hit TV series ‘24’, or from Jackie Chan movies. In this case, it was probably both, as the crooked CIA agent angle and the presence of nuclear weapons in the plot suggest Police Story IV: First Strike. The movie also resembles Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker (1997), in which George Clooney and Nicole Kidman have to stop Armenian terrorists from detonating a bomb in NYC. Unfortunately, this film lacks those movies’ production values, blazing pace, and exciting action sequences. The best I can say about this is that Steven Seagal seems to have attended all of his looping sessions, so it’s his voice we here for the entire film.

For being a film that is all talk, there is not a whole lot of explanation about any of the characters’ motivations. Why do the terrorists want to attempt an attack on American soil? To address some past wrong? To create a New World Order? There is a lot of talk from them as being martyrs for their cause, but we never learn what that “cause” is. Even murkier is the involvement of the CIA in this debacle. Why would you do that? More funding? Money? Are they all Chechen sympathizers? We never find any of that out. The movie forces us to watch 90 minutes of Steven Seagal’s smug non-acting, but to not actual end.

After a few years of working with Hong Kong action directors, Seagal teams up with stunt coordinators Dickey Beer and Mike Smith, who would go to direct the action sequences in numerous Seagal films later on. Smith is a veteran Hollywood stuntman, working in the industry since the early 1990s. His career as a stunt coordinator and fight choreographer is a little less distinguished, with the sci-fi vampire film Ultraviolet with Milla Jovavich standing out above the rest. Dickey Beer has been working in Hollywood for even longer, although his career as stunt supervisor has placed him in some high-profile films like the 007 film Tomorrow Never Dies and Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

I am going to assume that both men worked within the confines of a tight shooting schedule, a limited budget and Steven Seagal’s infamous difficult behavior. The action is limited to a few forgettable gunfights, which lack the visual panache of those we saw in Belly of the Beast and Out of Reach. There is a decent car chase through the (empty) streets of Los Angeles, which made me think of a low-budget Matrix Reloaded highway sequence. Martial arts fans will be the most disappointed with Black Dawn, as there is probably 30 seconds of fighting tops in the entire movie, and it’s not even performed by Seagal himself[1]. I’m going to assume that it’s Jeff Podgurski, Seagal’s stunt double, performing those limited arm twists and open-handed strikes. But even then, the filmmakers are so focused on hiding this fact that these short sequences are filmed up close and are heavily edited. On the other, Ching Siu-Tung knew that he wasn’t fooling anybody and just ran with it—his fight choreography was more important than who was performing the moves--which ultimately boosted Belly of the Beast on the whole. With Black Dawn, the stinginess seen in the action makes me wonder what the point of the exercise was in the first place.

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[1] - According to the Internet Movie Database, the reason for this was Steven Seagal walking off set before the production had finished.