Starring: Steven Seagal, Max Ryan, Harry Van Gorkum, Jeffrey
Pierce, Anna-Louise Plowman, Sherman Augustus, Gary Raymond, Philip Dunbar
Director: Michael Oblowitz
Action Director: Tom Delmar, Ryszard Janikowski
Half Past Dead was a box office disappointment and thus a kiss of death for Steven Seagal’s theatrical career. While he had starred in a few direct-to-video films before, like The Patriot and Ticker, it was in 2003 that his DTV career started in earnest. Up until recent years, Seagal has been quite prolific, releasing anywhere from two to four films per year. The quality of these movies has generally ranged from “decent” to “absolutely dismal”, only rarely reaching the level of “pretty good.” The first film in this cycle was The Foreigner, in which Poland acts as a stand-in for France and Germany.
Steven Seagal plays Jonathan Cold, a former (yawn!) CIA operative who now works as a freelance courier in Europe—great, first we were ripping off The Rock, now we’re doing Seagal’s The Transporter. Cold’s employer, Marquet (British TV actor Philip Dunbar), pressures him into a job to pick up a mysterious package outside of Paris and take it to Germany. Cold suspects that the job is a lot more complex than that, and the recent death of his diplomat father makes things even more complicated. As expected, the pick-up is interrupted by the arrival of a bunch of Danish gangsters, one of whom Cold saw years ago at club hanging out with Cold’s partner, Dunoir (Max Ryan, of Dark Moon Rising and Kiss of the Dragon).
When Cold stops by Warsaw, Poland to pay his respects to his late father, he is hassled by his old CIA boss, Olyphant (Gary Raymond, of El Cid and Jason and the Argonauts). We the viewer met Olyphant in the first scene when he was torturing another courier into revealing the location of the package now in Cold’s possession. Once Cold arrives in Germany with the box, he will find himself assailed on all sides by Olyphant and his assassins, Danish mobsters, the duplicitous Dunoir, and killers who may be working for his target, German businessman Jerome Van Aken—or his equally-mysterious wife, Meredith. And this being a Steven Seagal movie, we will discover that the contents of the box may implicate the CIA in some shady business.
The Foreigner is a fair-to-middling effort, helmed by South African director Michael Oblowitz. Oblowitz was best known as a music video director, although he received some degree of recognition a few years before for his neo-noir film, This World, then the Fireworks. Save a few out-of-place strobe light-esque quick-cut effects whenever someone is getting shot or thrown to the ground by Seagal, Oblowitz brings very little visual panache to the film. Instead, we get a convoluted narrative heaped onto a simple premise about a guy who has to deliver a box somewhere. Especially muddled is the handling of the character of Dunoir, who jumps back and forth so much between friend and enemy that we never really know why he does anything at all.
The villains are also disappointing, mainly because there are so many that we do not get to spend much time with any of them, save Dunoir. Van Aken is supposed to be the mastermind of it all, but he only shows up in one scene near the end before he is unceremoniously offed by another character. Olyphant is also trumped up to be involved the underhanded activities related to the parcel Cold is delivering, but he gets killed off even earlier than Van Aken does. By the end, the villains feel more like random fodder for Jonathan Cold to shoot than anything intimidating.
Speaking of shooting, gunplay makes up the major part of the film’s limited action. Scottish stuntman Tom Delmar is credited as the film’s Stunt Coordinator. Delmar has an impressive résumé, with more than 200 credits in 40-plus years in the business. As a fight coordinator, Delmar has mainly done a handful of indie and made-for-TV films, including the cult classic Trainspotting. In the last twenty years, he has worked with Hollywood action stars like Wesley Snipes (The Marksman and The Detonator) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (Wake of Death). The gunplay is serviceable, if nothing particularly eye catching. Demonstrations of aikido are limited to the occasional arm twist or takedown. There is an exchange of slap-boxing with one of the characters near the end, but it is short lived.
The Foreigner is largely a forgettable affair, although somehow it actually became the only one of Seagal’s DTV films to get a sequel, which we will discuss further down the line.
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