Driven to Kill (2009)

Driven to Kill (2009)
aka: Ruslan

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Mike Dopud, Igor Jijikine, Robert Wisden, Inna Korobkina, Zak Santiago, Andrew Rasputin
Director: Jeff King
Action Director: Garvin Cross

 

Driven to Kill continues something of a winning streak for Seagal, who showed us he still had it in him with films like Urban Justice and Pistol Whipped. I realize that Kill Switch is a bit loopy—your enjoyment of it depends on how much you’re willing to accept Seagal doing a Creole accent and give the Big Guy the benefit of the doubt in how much actual fight action he did—but Seagal definitely was on higher ground by 2009 than he had been going into 2007. Driven to Kill is just as violent and racy as anything else Seagal has done, so it’s more of the same, but done competently.

Steven Seagal plays Ruslan, an ex-Russian mobster who now writes crime novels. His daughter (Laura Mennell, of Watchmen and “The Man in the High Castle”), a prosecuting attorney, is engaged to Stephan (Dmitry Chepovetsky, of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol), the son of a former mob rival. On the eve of the wedding, some assassins break into his ex-wife's home, murder her, and critially-wound his daughter. So Ruslan teams up with his future son-in-law to find those responsible, who turns out to the latter's dad (Igor Jijikine, of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). In this film, we get to see Seagal try to fake a Russian accent, which is amusing, mainly because it results in him mumbling at a lower volume than usual.

There is a fair amount of action, ranging from gunplay to fisticuffs. It takes a little while for the action to get going, but things pick up after the first third. We start off with a gun fight with some arms dealers ending with some hand-to-hand combat with one of them. Shortly thereafter, Seagal and Stephan have a shootout at an NYC projects. Later, Seagal has a lengthy knife fight at a strip club. It is no SPL, but it is pretty decent. It plays fairly realistically: two men cautiously jabbing the air, occasionally striking the other’s weapon, until one of them finds and opening and goes in for the kill.

Seagal does a lot of simple aikido punching in his fights, and there are some very violent moments, like when he stabs a guy in the neck with a wrench. The final set piece is a shoot-out at a hospital, which is well-shot by Seagal standards. It does not surpass its inspiration—the insane finale to John Woo’s Hard Boiled—but it stands on its own. There is a classic Seagal moment of ingenuity when he places a hand grenade in a box full of surgical equipment to serve as deadly shrapnel. The sequence climaxes with a one-on-one fight with the mob boss, which has Seagal taking a few lumps (and even getting stabbed!) before dispatching his enemy in the most gruesome way possible.

On the Seagal Sleaze-o-Meter, we have several breasts exposed at a strip club, including a pair when Ruslan and his son-in-law have a man-to-man talk in a room with a private stripper. Nobody looks particularly happy to be there, so I do not think there is much titillation to be had. The movie also opens with Seagal's girlfriend (who is only in the first scene) offering him a threesome if he'll shower her how to do iron spike roulette; we don't see the result. Seagal films are nearly always exploitation fare, and Driven to Kill is really no different. But there is enough mayhem on display that I think most undemanding action fans will walk away reasonably satisfied with the result.