Hard to Kill (1990)

Hard to Kill (1990)

Starring: Steven Seagal, Kelly LeBrock, William Sadler, Frederick Coffin, Bonnie Burroughs, Andrew Bloch, Branscombe Richmond, Charles Boswell
Director: Bruce Malmuth
Action Director: Steven Seagal, Buddy Joe Hooker

 

Hard to Kill was the first Steven Seagal movie I saw and one of the earliest “adult” martial arts movies I watched, coming on the heels of my brother taping Kickboxer off HBO. It also was Seagal’s second starring role, and getting good buzz from his 80s actioner Above the Law. With only one exception, the general quality of the films Seagal made from 1988 to 1996 was solid and represented a Golden Age in the career of the actor. Things started coming apart after that, but that’s a story for another time.

Seagal plays Mason Storm, a detective for the LAPD whom we meet as he’s eavesdropping on a conversation between the mob and an unseen politician. What Storm does know is that the politician has murder on his mind: he wants the mob to arrange an “accident” for one of California’s current senators. Storm is found out, but is able to make his getaway before any of the mobsters actually see his face. What he doesn’t know is that the crooked government goon has some cops on the take who figure out that it was him who had recorded the conversation. Later that evening, a bunch of masked thugs crash Storm’s house as he’s making sweet love to his wife (TV actress Bonnie Burroughs) and riddle the place in buckshot. Mason is critically injured, his wife is killed and his son flees the premises.

Mason is initially pronounced dead. After the cops leave the hospital, one of the doctors informs his close friend, Lieutenant Kevin O’Malley (Frederick Coffin, of The Base and V.I. Warchawski), that Storm is still alive and in a coma. O’Malley swears to the doctors to secrecy and goes along with the whole “Mason is dead” ruse.

Seven years later, Mason awakens from his coma. One of the nurses, Andrea (Kelly LeBrock, Seagal’s wife at the time), calls the police to inform them that “John Doe” has awakened from his coma. Unfortunately, this news falls on the ears of the Bad Cops, who send one of their number to the hospital to finish off the job. Through a series of mishaps that prove that God was smiling down on Mason, Mason and Andrea are able to escape the hospital. She takes him to a huge house in the countryside where she’s housesitting—convenient, but okay—and there Mason begins his recovery with one thing on his mind: vengeance.

Hard to Kill is easily one of the better Seagal movies out there, from the acting to the action. The plot is no great shakes, but it’s generally well handled without any glaring holes. Well, there’s the one about how the hero can kill all of the bad guy’s lackeys without any legal repercussions, but is expected to spare the main villain at the end. That’s a major problem with Hollywood action movies in general, though. Director Bruce Malmuth, best known for directing Sylvester Stallone’s Nighthawks, keeps things moving at a fast clip, even during the (relatively) action-less second act.

That second act gives us something we generally don’t see in Seagal movies: training sequences. Seagal usually starts the film out as the baddest mofo on the planet and stays that way throughout. The fact that Seagal gets shot up in the first act and gets up out of his coma with his muscles all atrophied leaves more vulnerable than he generally allows his characters to be. The training sequences are nothing spectacular, mainly lifting weights, jogging, hitting a tree with a bo staff, and punching a wooden fence post. But as someone who has watched dozens of Steven Seagal movies, watching him work his way back up is a nice change of pace.

Steven Seagal films are rarely, if ever, pure martial arts films. There is a fair amount of gunplay in this movie, especially during a big shootout at the mansion. There are also some car chases, staged by veteran Hollywood stuntman Buddy Joe Hooker (12 Rounds and Grindhouse: Death Proof). Seagal choreographed his own fight sequences, of which there are a handful. Aikido was relatively new in Hollywood action movies in 1990, so audiences were probably wowed by the ease with which Seagal could take people down and redirect energy (i.e. glorified pushing) so as to shove people into walls. American audiences, who have always valued “realism” over “aesthetics,” would definitely gone for that kind of thing. The fights here generally end before they even begin, as Seagal takes the shortest path to snapping a wrist…or a neck…or a pool cue over a person’s head.

Seagal’s Mason Storm is more or less the same character he always plays, albeit without all the ex-Special Forces baggage that his characters usually carry. He does show some charisma within his limited acting range, although the whole bit of showing off his sex appeal with his real-life wife is rather voyeuristic[1]. He also gets to emote a little more than usually, even going so far as to raise his voice in a couple of moments. And being Golden Age Seagal, he’s still in tip-top shape with his girth perfectly under control. Strange how only some seven years or so later, that would be a thing of the past.

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[1] - I wonder how Kelly LeBrock felt about showing up in a movie where she would not only be engaging in simulated sex with her husband on camera, but watching the latter have simulated sex with another woman, too.

A Dangerous Man (2009)

A Dangerous Man (2009)
aka: On the Run

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Mike Dopud, Marlaina Mah, Vitaly Kravchenko, Jesse Hutch, Terry Chen, Byron Mann, Byron Lawson, Jerry Wasserman, Vincent Cheng
Director: Keoni Waxman
Action Director: Lauro David Chartand-DelValle, Chad Sayn

 

Much like The Keeper, Seagal’s next collaboration with director Keoni Waxman has surpassed a 5.0 score on the Internet Movie Database. In terms of the Seagal bell curve, that is really the best thing you can hope for. This one is actually a little bit better than The Keeper in terms of action and characterization, plus it has a better all-around cast.

The movie starts off in Con Air territory, with Seagal playing Shane Daniels, an ex-Special Forces op…where I have heard that one before? Shane comes to the rescue when a carjacker attacks his wife and chases the thug away. The would-be robber is found brutally murdered shortly thereafter and the blame falls on Shane. He gets sentences to ten years in prison. He gets released six years later after DNA evidence proves that he had not been responsible for the murder. The downside is that his wife got tired of waiting for him and filed for divorce, so Daniels is greeted in the free world by loneliness.

Now a simmering pot of anger, Shane wanders around the Pacific Northwest, wasting his compensation funds on alcohol. One day, he witnesses a state policeman pulling over a pair of Chinese men. While searching their vehicle, the cop finds a sports bag full of money. Before he can do anything, the two men overpower and kill him. Also at the scene are two Russian kids, one of whom, Sergey (Jesse Hutch, who worked with Seagal on the series “True Justice”), is the son of a local mobster, Vlad. When the Chinese gangsters attack the kids, Shane intervenes and rescues Sergey.  The two discover that besides a few million dollars in cash, there is a young woman stashed inside the car.

Said woman is Tia (Marlaina Mah, who now works as film producer). Her story is that she wanted to bring her uncle into the country. As her uncle was an accountant for the Chinese military, the U.S. government had him a list of people ineligible for a visa. Thus, Tia went to the local Chinese crime boss, Chen (Terry Chen, of TV shows like “Jessica Jones” and “House of Cards”), to sneak him into the country. The problem is that since her uncle was privy to a lot of military information—he handled the books associated with China’s excursions into the Golden Triangle—some people do not want him to leave. Specifically, a man known as The Colonel (Byron Mann, who had worked alongside Seagal in Belly of the Beast), who is paying Chen to double cross Tia. Since Tia knows about the Colonel and that Chen has the local police in his pocket, the woman most assuredly has a price on her head.

And now Shane Daniels has something to live for: protect Tia at all costs.

The storyline of A Dangerous Man—written by director Waxman—is reminiscent of Lethal Weapon 4, which involves Triads and Chinese military involved with the illegal immigration of an important individual. In this case, A Dangerous Man one sort of reverses the roles of the military and Triads in terms of who is the primary and secondary villains. And heck, Steven Seagal’s Shane Daniels ex-Special Forces op who lost his wife and has nothing to live for is very reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs, who had a similar background. I did enjoy watching Seagal play a hardened, angry man whose anger threatens to explode at any moment. It’s not a huge stretch for him, but it is nice to see him playing a more vulnerable character than usual.

Instead of Dickey Beer, the fights are arranged by veteran stuntman Lauro David Chartrand-DelValle. DelValle has worked on dozens of movies, big and small. Noteworthy jobs as fight coordinator include the big-budget Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai and the Gary Daniels film The White Tiger. The action is good, although the occasional use of undercranking in the fighting is a bit odd for a Seagal movie. Amusingly enough, in an interview with Scott Adkins for the “Art of Action” podcast, Seagal once claimed that his films were better than Donnie Yen’s because he never used undercranking. Yeah, man.

An early fight scene sees Seagal, boiling with rage, dismantling a mugger’s pistol and beating his head to a bloody pulp. Later, there are some nice exchanges of handwork between Seagal and some of his opponents, although the final fight with Byron Mann is a gyp. Byron Mann gets into a kung fu stance, and then Seagal just punches and throws him around like he was nothing. An early fight against a Triad in the parking lot was better choreographed than the finale. Before that, Seagal fights some other Chinese soldiers at an old mill and dispatches them in graphically violent ways. Add those to a pair of are two long firefights in the last act to keep action junkies happy.

The expected nudity is here. Whenever, Shane reminisces about the wife who left him, he remembers the time that she was dancing naked for him before engaging in Finally, I thought that Marleina Mah's character should have ended up with Sergei, the Russian mob boss's son, instead of Seagal. They were more alike in age and he took care of her during the fights. Bah, I tell you. Bah!

The Keeper (2009)

The Keeper (2009)

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Liezl Carstens, Arron Shiver, Johnnie Hector, Steph DuVall, Luce Raines, Kevin Wiggins, Trine Christensen
Director: Keoni Waxman
Action Director: Dickey Beer

 

The Keeper marks Steven Seagal’s first collaboration with Hawaiian filmmaker Keoni Waxman. They would go on to make nine films together, plus the TV series True Justice. Moreover, Waxman’s films were among the most higly-rated of Seagal’s post 2010 ouput, so obviously the guy found the key on how to work around Seagal’s limitations and occasionally problematic tendencies. While The Keeper is an uninspired, if competent, effort all around, it generally does carry the air of a professional production about it.

Seagal plays Roland Sallinger, a veteran LA cop who takes a bullet in the chest from his partner. The latter wanted to abscond with some drug money that nobody on the case was aware of, but Sallinger was too honest for that sort of underhandedness. After recovering from the murder attempt, Roland is forced into retirement, much to his dismay—he has no family save a niece (Danish actress Trine Christensen), whom he lives with.

He receives a call from an old colleague, Conner Wells (Steph DuVall), who got rich after inheriting his family’s oil-rich lands. However, his daughter, Nikita (Liezl Carstens, who played Seagal’s daughter-in-law in Urban Justice), has been the subject of an attempted kidnapping. Sallinger takes the job and heads out to Texas, beefing up the security around the Wells family compound and accompanying her on her frequent clubbing excursions. Meanwhile, a local crime boss, Jason Cross (Luce Rains, of The Marksman and 3:10 to Yuma) starts pressuring someone on the inside into selling her out.

The plot is very reminiscent of the Jet Li film Bodyguard from Beijing. However, unlike Christy Chung’s spoiled rich girl character, Nikita warms up to Roland Sallinger fairly quickly. That is because this is Steven Seagal we are talking about her, and as the saying goes, he makes every man sweat and every woman wet. While there are some subtle hints that Nikita might like Roland in that way, the film thankfully does not pursue that particular subplot.

The performances are pretty solid. The best we can hope for from Seagal is that he does his own looping, which seems to be the case here. Fortunately, he does not try to expand his range by attempting Tennessee twangs or Russian accents and other nonsense like that. Steph DuVall, who plays Roland’s long-time friend, does a decent job. DuVall mostly has a television background, with his biggest role being on the 2002 series “The Guardian.” Luce Rains (aka Steven Hartley) has had a long career in TV movies and has shown up in numerous contemporary western films, too. My main complaint his character is a throwaway line about Jason Cross being a white supremacist of sorts, but it is forgotten as soon as it is brought up.

There is a decent amount of action, all of it solidly filmed, edited and choreographed by longtime Seagal collaborator Dickey Beer. Seagal has a brief fight at a club, where he does arm locks and throws, keeping it simple. There is a big gunfight in the street which is well shot. Seagal later fights a thug at a restaurant and does more kicking than usual. The finale has him killing numerous targets with a sniper rifle before facing off with the main villain's lieutenant, played by Eb Lottimer. The two have a sweet exchange of handwork before Seagal starts throwing him and around and dispatches him in a typical grisly faction.

Unsurprisingly, there is some female flesh on display, although it doesn't revolve around Seagal. In one scene, the young lady's boxer boyfriend is kissing a topless woman while the lady is in the next room. The villain has a naked masseuse in one throwaway scene. Lastly, we have another scene of the boyfriend snorting lines off a naked prostitute's buttocks[1]. While I am sure that sex sells and helps his movies to do well on home video, I wonder why he insisted on doing things this way for so long. This is especially true once you remember that he was one of the first Caucasian Hollywood celebrities to publicly come out as Buddhist. Whenever celebrities make much ado about their spirituality and then make movies that are filled to the brim with nudity and violence, I cannot help but shake my head. I guess Seagal is like the evil monk in 1993’s Iron Monkey: he practices Buddhism in his heart, not in his mouth (or eyes or penis).

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[1] - Said prostitute is played by Alexandria Morrow. She had small roles in Zoolander and The Avengers. On the Brazilian DVD, her name is written in a large font in the upper right-hand corner of the back cover, right next to Steven Seagal. I'm not sure what to make of it. The same DVD cover also says, "from the special FX team that gave you Hancock." Is that the sort of info that would convince a non-Seagal fan to check this film out?

 

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.

Kill Switch (2008)

Kill Switch (2008)
Aka: Killing Point; A Higher Form of Learning

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Isaac Hayes, Holly Elisa, Michael Filipowich, Chris Thomas King, Mark Collie, Karyn Michelle Baltzer, Phillip Granger
Director: Jeff King
Action Director: Steven McMichael, Larry Lam, Scott J. Ateah, Marcus Young

 

After the entertaining Urban Justice and Pistol Whipped, we get Steven Seagal's Zodiac…or Steven Seagal’s The Bone Collector. Usually a serial killer premise does not give itself to martial arts movies, on the grounds that there would only be one opponent for the hero to fight. A good example of that was Jeff Speakman’s The Expert, in which the martial arts action was left for the end. Obviously, the creative way to work around that is to make the serial killer a martial artist as well, like in Tiger Claws; Bloodmoon; and the relatively recent Kung Fu Killer. Another workaround is for the psycho to ally himself up with other bad guys, like in Beauty Investigator. This film, one of Seagal’s more action-packed films from the 2000s, gives us two serial killers plus a some tertiary bad guys for Seagal to take down.

Here he plays Jacob King, a homicide detective for the Memphis (played by Vancouver) Police Detective. King is plagued by memories of his adolescence, specifically the memory of his watching his twin brother get killed by a serial killer at their birthday party. In the opening scene, he takes down a psychopath named Billy Joe (Mark Colllie, who worked with Seagal in Fire Down Below), who has a penchant for stitching bombs into his female victims. After roughing him up something good, King turns his sights to another killer known as "The Grifter."

This particular piece of work leaves the bodies with astrological signs carved into the bodies, but not before savagely beating them to death with blunt objects. The Grifter also leaves behind coded letters that nobody has deciphered yet. So, while King is on the case, working overtime to figure out the code in hopes that it will lead him both to the killer and his next victims. Meanwhile, he also has to deal with a green-in-the-ears FBI agent (Holly Elissa, of the TV series “Whistler” and “Arrow”). Things get even more complicated when Billy Joe is let out of jail on account of the extreme brutality that King used while arresting him.

Kill Switch is an entertaining Seagal flick, albeit not quite as good as his previous efforts were. This one gets points for doing something a little different by Seagal standards, even though viewers will get a certain feeling of déja vu from the proceedings. The most original touch is having Seagal play a Memphis policeman, and watching Seagal fake a Tennessee twang for 90 minutes is absolutely surreal. A year later, Seagal would star in the TV series “Steven Seagal: Lawman,” following his work as a reserve deputy sheriff in Louisiana. He receives ample support from his supporting cast, including award-winning Blues musician Chris Thomas King as King’s partner; the late Isaac Hayes as a police coroner; and Mike Collie as the crazed killer Billy Joe.

The only major fault in the plot is a subplot involving the Grifter framing Seagal’s character for one of the murders. It is brought up in the third act, never actually comes to King’s attention, and is solved offscreen. I mean, we can probably complain about the psychology of serial killers and how this film handles it, or how unnecessary (and borderline fascist) the police brutality portrayed is. However, this is a Steven Seagal film, and a post-2002 one to boot. We judge it on other merits, like: Do we hear Seagal’s voice most of the time? Does he perform his own fighting? Is there any fighting at all in the film? The answer to all of those is “Yes, for the most part.” So as a Seagal film, it justifies its existence.

There is a fair amount of action and, unlike most of the Big Man’s movies, the fights are all very lengthy. That surprised me. He also takes more lumps than he usually does in his movies, which is also unexpected. The first fight has Seagal repeatedly throwing (or shoving) a guy through walls, which goes on longer than most Seagal throwdowns. Shortly afterward, he is heavily doubled in a lengthy fight against a pimp and his henchmen, which pours out into the streets and becomes a lengthy shoot-out. Later fights feature more punching than Seagal usually does, sometimes taking on the character of an MMA ground pounding. There is lots of “elegant” arm flailing--especially in his second fight with the Grifter—the closest we get an old fashioned Hong Kong cinema exchange of punches. The action has a mean-spirited streak, with Seagal's character taking pleasure in maiming his opponents--watch him break a guy to pieces with a hammer in once sequence. For the most part, the action satisfies, although it could have done with less quick cuts and drop-frame editing in some places.

The prerequisite Seagal sleaze comes during the film’s coda, set some years after the resolution of the main conflict. Seagal's character comes home to his beautiful young Russian trophy wife (and two Russian-speaking sons), who takes him to their bedroom and bares her breasts before Seagal closes the door behind him. Final scene titillation is a Bond thing, not a serial killer movie thing. And it's even stranger considering that Seagal's character had an ill-fated girlfriend whom he spent the film ignoring, even when she was waltzing around his pad carrying a sign that read "There's room in my knickers for you." It is a frankly bizarre and inappropriate way to end such a dark and gruesome film.

Pistol Whipped (2008)

Pistol Whipped (2008)
Aka: The Marker; Deathly Weapon

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Paul Calderon, Lance Henriksen, Bernie McInerey, Antoni Corone, Matt Salinger, Renée Elise Goldberry, Lydia Jordan
Director: Roel Reiné
Action Director: Dickey Beer, Mike Smith

 

After the enjoyable Urban Justice, Steven Seagal came out with Pistol Whipped. Surprisingly, this one was just as good, if not better. Part of its success stems from Roel René's stylish direction, good photography and solid editing. While the Dutch-born René has become something of a go-to guy for sequels—having directed follow-ups to The Condemned; The Man with the Iron Fists; and Death Race—his sense of visuals are very reminiscent of John Woo. That is probably why he was hired to direct Hard Target 2 in 2016.

But what's really surprising is that for once Seagal allows himself to play a deeply flawed character, something extremely rare in the man’s filmography. I mean, he's still a complete bad-ass once he gets going, but he's initially an alcoholic gambling addict who's also a bit of deadbeat dad. He’s not the best at everything he does—and as a result, his character’s personal life is in complete shambles as the film opens. That sort of characterization is almost unheard of for He Who Twists Wrists.

Seagal plays Matt Conner, a disgraced former policeman who's down on his luck. His home is up for sale. He rarely remembers to spend any time with his daughter, of whom he has limited custody. He drinks himself to sleep every night. Worst of all, he owes a lot of money to a number of establishments because of his "problem gaming" tendencies. His debts are picked up by mysterious figure known as "The Old Man" (Lance Henriksen) and Matt has to pay them off by performing hits against bad people in high places.

While staking out his first hit, an Italian mobster, Matt picks up a bar floozie named Drea (Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry) and the two become lovers. He liquidates his target and soon has to kill a Chinese gangster. When he fails to off the informant as ordered, this puts him at odds with his “handler,” a mysterious man named Blue (Paul Calderón, of Sea of Love and King of New York, playing a sort of prototype for Lance Riddick’s Continental Manager in the John Wick movies). Things really get complicated when Matt finds out who his third target is.

There is a fair amount of aikido in this one and once more, it looks like Seagal is doing his own work for most of it. It is nothing too flashy, usually just twists and breaks, punctuated by the occasional front kick. But with these direct-to-video films, you take what you can get. The climax is a protracted shootout set at a graveyard that is expertly filmed and honestly, would make John Woo feel proud. Director Roël René expertly uses slow motion to accentuate the force of bullets as they tear tombstones to pieces and it really helps the film on a dramatic level. An earlier gunfight in the street is just as captivating, thanks to some nice car stunts and the initial set-up of Seagal completely boxed on both sides by his assailants. Seagal even takes a bullet at one point, which makes his character less unbeatable than he usually is. This sort of solid action, along with a good story and unconventional role for Seagal, contributes handily to this becoming one his better films, period.

Urban Justice (2007)

Urban Justice (2007)
aka: Once Upon a Time in the Hood; Renegade Justice

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Eddie Griffin, Carmen Serano, Cory Hart, Liezl Carstens, Kirk B. R. Woller, Mary Evans, Al Staggs, Jade Yorker, Jermaine Washington
Director: Don E. FauntLeRoy
Action Director: Dickey Beer, Mike Smith

 

If we consider Black Dawn to be the absolute nadir of Seagal’s output during the aughts—someone would argue that said distinction belongs to Attack Force—then naturally that meant that anything else he made would be something of a step up. Flight of Fury, made by the same schmos who gave us Attack Force, was a step in the right direction, I suppose. That also means that the bar was still pretty low during the second half of 2007. It thus comes as a surprise that Urban Justice is as good as it is—had he followed up the (relative) box office success of Exit Wounds with this (instead of Half Past Dead), his theatrical shelf life might have lasted a few more years.

Urban Justice is in many ways vintage 1990s Seagal film cross-bred with the sort of ghetto movie that was popular during the same decade—think Boyz in the Head; South Central; or Jason’s Lyric. Before we go further, let’s get this out of the way: I haven't heard so many F-bombs in a movie since Menace II Society. There’s an F-word in practically every other sentence…sometimes two per sentence for several consecutive lines of dialog. Even Seagal, who has never been above swearing in his movies, goes full Samuel-Jackson-in-a-Tarantino-film potty mouth for this outing.

Seagal plays a Simon Ballister, a loner with a questionable history whose son is murdered in what we the viewer know was an ordered hit. We also know that some corrupt cops are involved, albeit to what extent, the film holds its cards close to its chest. Ballister strolls into Compton, California to set up shop and do what he does best: snap wrists and break arms in his search for the Truth. A police informant, Gary (Jade Yorker, of He Got Game and The Gridiron Gang), suggests that the Mexican gang might have called the hit; Ballister’s son was a cop who was shutting down the local betting parlors on El Chivo’s (Machete’s Danny Trejo) territory.

At the same time, Simon gets a hit placed on his head after showing up at a hideout for El Chivo’s rivals, the East Side Gangstas, and breaking a few necks. A hard ass named Armand (Eddie Griffin, the second biggest name in the cast) runs the gang and we soon learn that he is in league with some dirty detectives, including the one assigned to the Ballister murder case. The question still stands, however: Who exactly ordered the hit and who carried it out? Ballister is raising hell all over South Central with one goal in mind: find the man who pulled the trigger.

Seagal does himself (heh) justice by showing up to all of his looping sessions and performing all of his fight scenes, which are more plentiful here than in many of his other DTV movies. The fights are often filmed in Bourne style, but I'm confident that it's Seagal doing those lethal front kicks. We get a fight scene early on where he beats up some Mexicans in front of a liquor store, followed in short order by a fight at one of Armand’s safe houses. We get a few more throws and clothesline hits when he visits a Mexican bar, plus another fight at a gangsta’s house. The movie also ends with a violent fight in which Ballister completely manhandle’s his opponent in vintage Seagal form.

There is a lot of graphically-violent gunplay in the film. I am talking John Woo level of redrum getting spilled here. Nobody gets shot without two pints of blood spurting out of the exit wound…and A LOT of people get blown away in this movie. The penultimate action sequence is a long, bloody exchange of gunplay near the store where Ballister is staying. A couple of dozen gangstaz do the dance of death here, and if Chow Yun-Fat weren’t a pacifist in real life, he’d be proud of the carnage on display. Add all this to strong supporting performances, a lack of the usual quotient of Seagal Sleaze--there is one scene where Eddie Griffin jokes to two scantily-clad women about snorting lines off of his penis—and Seagal doing his own voiceovers, and you get a pleasant surprise.

Flight of Fury (2007)

Flight of Fury (2007)
Aka: Black Thunder; Enemy of the Unseen

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Mark Bazely, Steven Toussaint, Ciera Payton, Angus MacInnes, Alki David, Tim Woodward, Katie Jones, Cristina Teodorescu
Director: Michael Keusch
Action Director: Tom Delmar, Gabi Burlacu

 

Steven Seagal's follow-up to the inept Attack Force is a remake of American Ninja Michael Dudikoff's Black Thunder. Although William C. Martell wrote the latter, Seagal and writer/producer Joe Halpin are given full writing credits here, with Martell only getting a "Special Thanks" at the end. The similarities are so obvious that Seagal and Halpin did not even bother to change a lot of the characters’ names.

Seagal plays an ex-CIA operative/military Renaissance man who bails out of prison before the CIA can wipe his memory clean for knowing too many government secrets. The movie does not explain his background very well. To the military, he was the best stealth bomber pilot they had ever had. On the other hand, the CIA thought he knew too much, which would assume he was working knee-deep in some really secretive stuff. Can a man be both of those? Make up your mind, people!

He is picked up by the police in Southern California after foiling a robbery with his awesome aikido skills and is handed over to the military, who have a job for him: go into Afghanistan and retrieve a stolen experimental stealth bomber before terrorists use it to spread a deadly plague. The pilot who stole the aircraft is a former student of Seagal’s—another overused troupe in these movies. His contact in Afghanistan is a former lover (played by 18-year-old Ciera Payton).

Apparently, Seagal lost some weight for the role, and the film has a fair amount of action. I think it is Seagal doing most of the fighting, or at least they made more of an attempt to hide it better. Early on there’s a scene where Seagal foils a convenience store robbery, which feels ripped off from his earlier Hard to Kill. There are a lot of knife stabbings and a semi-long (by Seagal's standards) pole fight against a terrorist at the end. It is no Gordon Liu vs. Philip Ko Fei from Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, or Jet Li vs. Donnie Yen from Once Upon a Time in China II.  It’s mainly attack, block, attack, block, Seagal hits the guy in face, rinse and repeat. Nonetheless, with these late period Seagal films, we take what we can get. Disappointingly, the movie ends with an unexciting dog fight between an F-16 and a stealth bomber.

On the salacious side of things, the movie had some @MeToo goings-on with the lead actress. According to the Internet Movie Database, Miss Payton signed on to the film with only having had half the script sent to her. It was only when she was en route to Romania that she discovered that there would be a nude scene leading into a lesbian sex scene. When she brought her concerns to Seagal, his response was (apparently), "So you don't want to show off your tits?" Bear in mind that the woman had recently graduated into adulthood. She did end up clothed for the sequence in question, however. Nonetheless, Ciera Payton has gone on to say that she felt like a sex object during that particular experience.

Attack Force (2006)

Attack Force (2006)
aka: Harvester

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Lisa Lovbrand, David Kennedy, Matthew Chambers, Danny Webb, Andrew Bicknell, Evelyne Armella O’Bami, Ileana Lazariuc
Director: Michael Keusch
Action Director: Tom Delmar, Gabi Burlacu

 

And the award for the Least Creative Title of 2006 goes to…Attack Force. In Steven Seagal’s defense, I’m pretty sure like the rest of the film, the über-generic title has more to do with studio meddling during post-production than it does with the original film that Seagal made. As it goes, the story “Harvester” was the brainchild of Steven Seagal—sort of his version of the 1990s sci fi-action film I Come in Peace. The premise had aliens coming to Earth to harvest human DNA, and Seagal and his team had to stop them without bringing their attention to the public. That was the story and the film that was made.

But the studio did not like that particular film, so they brought in some of the actors to film new scenes of the characters talking about experimental drugs and re-dubbed Seagal’s dialog in parts so he was talking about experimental drugs. In the end, the studio essentially made a new movie about Seagal and his team fighting rage zombies with an inexplicable preference for bladed weapons. Not all evidence of Seagal’s original idea was scrubbed, however. Notice in the closing credits that Ileana Lazariuc credited as “The Queen.” In any case, the bad dubbing (watch Seagal’s voice change in the same scene) and bizarre plotting took a huge karma toll on the movie and Attack Force is one of his lowest-rated movies on the IMDB.

Seagal plays Marshall Lawson, a special forces team commander looking for some R&R with his team in Paris. Three of his men head to nearest strip club for some action and bring home a seductive little nymph named Reina (Evelyne Armella O’Bami). Before the threesomes can begin, Reina goes nutzoid and carves up all three men with a wicked knife. The autopsy shows signs of an experimental drug called CTX on the bodies. The drug is so secret that the company who made it, a government contractor, will want to stop at nothing to keep news of it from breaking out. Even if it means killing Marshall Lawson and his men.

So, Lawson now has his hands full: he is trying to find Reina; his partner is tracking down the drug dealer who gave Reina the drugs, who turns out to be CTX’s creator, Aroon (prolific video game voice actor Adam Croasdell); and he has to not get himself killed by the government agents. Once Aroon releases the CTX drug into the water supply and infects an entire Paris suburb, he’ll have to team up with the military to stop Aroon and his partner, a femme fatale known as “The Queen.”

On the plus side, I like the horror movie atmosphere of the film. It has a subtle soundtrack and the sort of horror movie lighting that keeps things visible, if barely so. There is an ominous feeling to the whole film, especially in the third act when the good guys start raiding houses, looking for people who may or may not be CTX-addled maniacs. In some ways, this becomes Steven Seagal’s The Crazies, beating the remake to the punch by four years. The violence is also very visceral, with most people being dispatched via elaborate bladed weapons that leave deep, bloody gashes in their victims.

On the other hand, the film never quite makes any sense. For example, in the original script, the Queen was obviously the leader of the aliens, even if she stayed behind the scenes for most of the film. Now that the movie is about a drug dealer whose creation transforms people into homicidal maniacs, we the viewer are left to wonder who this woman is and why she is so important—the final fight belongs to her and Seagal, not Seagal and Aroon. Like a lot of low-budget Seagal films, this one is very talky. We are treated to endless scenes of Seagal talking to his partner or his former trainee/girlfriend (Swedish actress Lisa Lovbrand), the drug company’s executives talking to military brass about having to off Seagal, or his partner interrogating Aroon. Less talk and more action would have been better.

The action is handled by Tom Delmar once more. There is a solid shoot-out at a safe-house between Seagal’s team and the mercenaries sent to silence them. The gunplay in the finale is less inspired and more chaotic. Seagal gets a special weapon in the form a pair of “nano-graphite” blades that extend from his form, not too unlike Marvel characters Wolverine and the Owl. Unfortunate, the ominous lighting means that when the fights do come, they are generally hard to see. The final fight with actress Ileana Lazariuc is a bit longer, but the illusion of a man fighting a drug-addled superwoman is ruined by the make-up man not remembering where a bloody gash on her chest is from one scene to another! They all do the thrice-damned camera trick of having Seagal just look at the camera and flail his arms wildly into it. I loathe that since it gives no real sense of proportion, space or interaction with the other performers.

Attack Force is a bad movie, least of which because the titular team figures little into the plot or the film as a whole. There is a surplus of graphic violence on display, and a small helping of titillation that never quite makes it to full-on nudity or sex, but I’m sure most viewers will find the proceedings to alternate between hysterical ineptness and general tedium.

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.

Submerged (2005)

Submerged (2005)
aka: Enemy Within

 

Starring: Steven Seagal, Christine Adams, William Hope, Vinnie Jones, Gary Daniels, Nick Brimble, Alison King
Director: Anthony Hickox
Action Director: Steve Griffin, George Karlukovski

Although the title and cover art point to a conspiracy thriller set on a submarine (think Crimson Tide or The Hunt for Red October), those actually are a bait and switch for what is actually a political thriller in the vein of The Manchurian Candidate. Considering Seagal’s track record up to this point in ripping off other, better movies, it shouldn’t be surprising that a remake of the 1962 classic with Frank Sinatra saw release in theaters that very year. Obviously, one would be foolish to expect a whole lot from a movie like this, and while it occasionally has a bit of low-budget charm, it also feels more like a violent, feature-length episode of “G.I. Joe” than a taut political thriller.

The film opens in Uruguay (played by Bulgaria), where a drone sent by the US embassy discovers a hidden military base housed within a dam. The soldiers running the place are a bit spooked to know that the Americans have found out about the place, but the mysterious Dr. Lehder (Nick Brimble, of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and A Knight’s Tale) isn’t worried: he presses a few buttons on his cell phone and suddenly the Secret Servicemen in the embassy gun down everybody present before blowing their own heads off.

Shortly thereafter, the U.S. military sends in a team to blow up the base. However, a psychotic episode by team leader Sharpe (Gary Daniels, of Tekken and City Hunter) results in the team getting gunned down and the survivors getting captured. With their backs against the wall, the military turns to Cody (Seagal), a former mercenary jailed by his former employers because of their own screw-up. Cody and his team, including Vinnie Jones (Juggernaut from X-Men: The Last Stand), are offered a financial reward and a clean slate if they blow up the base. They are joined by Dr. Chappell (Christine Adams, of Agents of SHIELD and Black Lightning), a psychologist working in the government’s employ.

Despite the opposition from a small army of Uruguayan soldiers, the mercenaries are successful. They destroy the dam and rescue Sharpe and a few of his teammates, making their escape in a commandeered submarine. Unfortunately, Sharpe and his men have been brainwashed by Lehder, and soon our heroes are fighting for their lives from a bunch of crazed soldiers in an obsolete water vessel with the American Navy trying to kill them as well.

One may think that given the synopsis above, the film will largely be about our heroes’ travails while aboard a submarine. Not really. The submarine sequence accounts only for the second act; the original title of The Enemy Within better describes the film as a whole. The idea of regular people—or even government agents—being captured and brainwashed into becoming sleeper agents is unnerving. Given that director Anthony Hickox was first as foremost a horror director, that actually makes a lot of sense. Hickox is best known for the 80s film Waxwork and its sequel, both of which were homages to old school horror movies, especially Universal and Hammer films. He also directed the third Hellraiser installment and the sequel to Warlock before moving onto more uninspired fare.

While there are some moments of genuine suspense, the variable nature of the brainwashing deflates much of the tension. The film implies that the process involves forcing the subject to watch different images, which become ingrained in his (or her) mind. Said images allow for the controller to give hypnotic suggestions to the person. But that is where things get fuzzy. In the beginning, the film suggests that the suggestions are given early on and subsequently triggered by a stimulus, like an image on a cell phone. Later on, Dr. Lehder has to verbally guide one of his subjects to carry out his commands. In some cases, regular people become sleeper agents and react without any trigger whatsoever. A more consistent approach to the plot device would have been better.

It also would have been better if there was more and better action. People looking for your typical fix of Seagal aikido will no doubt be disappointed. The first fight comes about halfway through, where he throws down with British martial artist Gary Daniels, best known for dressing up as Street Fighter II’s Ken in the Jackie Chan film City Hunter. Daniels had also made a name for himself in numerous low-budget, high-octane B-movies, like Rage, Recoil, and the live-action adaptation of Fist of the North Star. Daniels is a great martial artist, and reported mounted a long and elaborate fight against Seagal alongside stunt coordinator Steve Griffin (F9: The Fast Saga and Solo: A Star Wars Story). Then Seagal got his sweaty mitts on it and choreographed a 30-second, one-sided fight in which he throws Daniels around for a while before stabbing him with a kitchen knife.

There are some decent car stunts in the action, plus a couple of okay shootouts. Seagal’s signature weapon in here is a 12-gauge shotgun, which is a nice change of pace from his usual pistol branding. In one very silly scene, however, Seagal and his men are in a tunnel, standing in front of a few dozen men armed with AK-47s and mowing them down while the soldiers fail to score a single hit on the good guys. That particular scene really took me out of the action.

Apparently Seagal and director Hickox did not get along, which resulted in Seagal walking off the project. While his absence is not noted in the film itself, it is pretty obvious that he missed more than half of the looping sessions, because his character’s voice jumps back and forth between Seagal’s real voice and that of another actor. Back to the cartoon comparison, it’s like an episode of the early 90s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” cartoon whenever the voice actors got confused and the result was Michealangelo’s voice coming out of Leonardo. It cheapens the entire production, which was already suffering from problems in both the script and action direction.