I’m not about to waste valuable review space defending the Man against the Seagalaholics who have fallen off the wagon – movies like Today You Die can do it much more effectively.

Tired of Seagal being an ex-CIA guy on the lam from the Company while simultaneously trying to help someone else out? Well this time Sumo Steve is a thief who steals from scummy drug dealers and gives the proceeds (minus a small handling fee of course) to the poor.

But he’s looking to get out of the biz and go legit so that he and his girlfriend Jada can lead a normal life. So he gets a job driving an aromered car in Las Vegas and – wait a sec! Did I just say that Seagal had a girlfriend?

You better believe it! This isn’t your dad’s early 2000s straight to video Seagal! This is modern mid-2000s straight to video Seagal! And that means some heavy duty loving from our heavy duty action hero!

You get three different scenes in this film where Seagal is lying around in bed with his old lady. And if you think he’s ultra sauve when he’s mumbling some curse-filled putdown to a dirtbag right before he snaps an elbow, you should see him in the sack all decked out in big baggy sweat shirts! Big Steve knows not only what the ladies like, but what they need!

Jada isn’t just in the movie though to provide Steve with some relaxation in between shooting gangs of toughs, breaking out of prison, and teaming up with Naughty By Nature’s Treach to bring down the guys who framed him for something that he actually did! She’s got her own set of supernatural superpowers!

Jada frequently badgers Steve with her stupid dreams and visions and once in awhile we even get subjected to them via some really cheesey special effects. The best part of all this black magic hoodoo babble is that it turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the movie!

Except that the visions tell her that the bad guy is… a bad guy! You know, in case Steve didn’t figure it out when he was doublecrossed into a life sentence in prison.

The set up goes something like this: Steve is forced to drive an armored car at gun point through the streets of Las Vegas with $20 million in stolen loot in the back. Along the way, he single-handedly destroys the entire fleet of cop cars that Las Vegas has at their disposal.

Cars are rammed, cars flip through the air, cars slide down streets, cars roll over, cars explode, Seagal intentionally rear ends a camper and blows it up, is completely indifferent when the police set the armored car on fire, and eventually escapes long enough to hide the money before passing out and getting hauled off to prison.

What I like about Seagal in all these movies is that regardless of the situation he’s faced with, he never seems remotely bothered by it. Long prison sentence with everyone gunning for him because they want to force him to tell where the loot is? The only reaction that gets from Steve is a smug smirk, a comment about how he hit his head during the armored car chase and has amnesia about where the money is, and plenty of prison beat downs for the punks who try to get fresh with him.

But he’s still got enough upstairs to form an alliance with Treach who just happens to have an escape plan he’ll hook Seagal up with for a cut of the money. It involves an ex-Nam pilot who has a Sherrif’s helicopter in for repairs at a nearby hanger. You can guess the rest.

During their flight to freedom, Treach is hooting and hollering while the guards are shooting at them. You know what Seagal is doing? Laughing! It’s like he forgot the camera was on him and he couldn’t contain his amusement that he was getting paid to hang out with Naughty By Nature!

Once Steve is back on the street and properly outfitted in an absurd floor-legnth brown leather coat, he can get down to brass tacks. This means that he and Treach engage in hilariously stilted exchanges as they cruise around Vegas looking for guys to shoot.

Between Treach’s G-Bonics (hey, that’s what he called it in prsion!) and Seagal’s mouth full of marbles, I didn’t catch most of what was being said, but I’ll bet it was awesome!

But I caught enough to understand that Seagal managed to arrange a gang war between an Asian gang and a white gang. It had something to do with Steve’s quest for revenge or to clear his name or to get his money or something.

Lots more Seagal-inspired violence (and inspired Seagal violence!) follows including Steve sticking a guy’s head in a vise, shooting a guy inside a car, then having it torched while maintaining to Treach that the guy was depressed and shot himself, and of course a showdown with the evil Max.

Max’s hideout was decked out with occult knick knacks and lots of lit candles and Max himself was playing a piano. Max announces that he was born with evil inside him or something along those lines and Seagal responds as only Seagal can: “That’s chilling. You also seem to have a great propensity for music.” Then he shoots everyone! And because this is pure Seagal gold, there was still another extended shoot out sequence after this one!

Miss this one and risk your credibility as a true action movie fan! Must be seen for the moment when Steve uses the word “jejune” in a sentence!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Director Anthony Hickox (Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and couple of Dolph Lundgren movies you’ve never heard of) pulls every editing trick he can to keep things moving at a frenetic pace in spite of his star’s stunning immobility.

Lots of quick cuts and jittery action punctuated every now and again by a little slow motion (aside from Seagal’s perpetual slow motion) all combine to give the viewer the sense of being thrust into the confusing underworld of double agents and shifting alliances. Or it may just give you a headache.

Way down in Uruguay, a certain Dr. Lehder is creating an army of mind controlled soldiers in his secret lab underneath a dam. His subjects? The American commando team that was sent to take him out and were ultimately betrayed by the evil CIA agent Fletcher!

In all fairness to the CIA, I couldn’t swear that Fletcher was ever so identified, but in these kinds of films it’s de rigeur for the Company to get blamed for pretty much every little fart that happens in these banana republics.

The military is desperate to stop Lehder, but who can they get that could smash his evil schemes without the danger of his brain being compromised? Cue the slow motion, the electric guitars, and the scene of one Steven Seagal (dressed sensibly in black of course) being hauled onto a battleship in chains!

It doesn’t take long for Seagal to announce that he’s been in the stockade and it takes us just about the length of time to notice that this is a different Seagal than what we’ve all been raised on. No, I don’t mean the fact that he looks like death warmed over. That’s been the case for about ten years now. I mean the voice.

In an interesting turn of events that will leave the viewer with a flummoxed look on his face throughout the movie, Steve has chosen to endow his character of Chris Cody with an accent!

And not just any accent! I cannot with any certainty tell you what accent Steve is employing (and I suspect that Steve couldn’t either), but the closest thing I can think of is that it is some kind of Cajun accent. At least he talks about stuff like “alligatahs” and otherwise sort of sluggishly delivers his lines. It could also have been the result of some kind of side effect from prescription medication.

No matter though, because the government makes one of those once in a lifetime offers that’s always so popular with guys who are the best at doing Lady Liberty’s dirty business, but invariably get locked up because of the gutless politicians who don’t understand that freedom isn’t free.

We’re told that Seagal averted a 9/11 on the water near Hawaii when he blew up an explosive-laden tanker, but that the United Nations raised hell and got Seagal and his crew imprisoned! If Seagal and his team can take down Lehder, they will all get full pardons and $100,000 each! That’s a lot of endless buffets for big Steve!

Director Hickox knows that garbage like character development might get in the way of Seagal hijacking a Uruguayan sub, so in lieu of that, he introduces Steve’s crew dossier-style, showing us each person while their name and areas of expertise (dynamic entry, small arms, sniper, unidentifiable dialects) are flashed across the screen.

Once all this is established and the wily Seagal sniffs out Fletcher as a double agent and avoids the ambush Fletcher had set up, it’s pretty much non-stop mayhem, murder, and mumbling!

After hooking up with a sexy field operative who had been in a local watering hole arm-wrestling locals, the assault on the underground lab beneath the dam begins. They manage to rescue the prisoners and defeat the Uruguayan army (20 soldiers and one tank), but the crafty Lehder is already gone! Next stop is stealing a getaway sub!

This part of the operation allows Seagal to display his cool professionalism as he watches his expert sniper shoot and set guys on fire while uttering witticisms as these guys fall burning into the ocean. And that was only a warm up for his stint impersonating the U.S. ambassador at the opera!

I bet you didn’t see that plot twist coming! That’s what I like about this movie. I just assumed that most of it would be Seagal wandering around a sub, beads of sweat pooling in his chins as he pensively wondered how much further the sub could go down before she buckled under the pressure. But that sub got blown up after they were only it for about ten minutes! How did the stockade ever survive this guy?

To be completely honest, I never paid that much attention to the dealings of Fletcher and Lehder. I just used their scenes to catch my breath from the outbreaks of Seagal-instigated carnage. Seagal at the opera? Would you be shocked if it ended with one of his crew shooting the conductor?

But that was just the warm up for his drive through the city that saw him run over guards, ram a helicopter and drive right through an office building! But that was just a warm up for him to beat a guy senseless with his kung jitsu before blowing his brains out!

And guess what? That was just a warm up for him to kick Fletcher in the air about a half a city block and through a window where he landed on the mind control apparatus and impaled on Lehder’s fancy walking stick! All this plus an appearance by kickboxing movie legend Gary Daniels, too! As Steve himself might say, “another helping please!”

© 2010 MonsterHunter

He also was smart enough to start the movie with Steve teaching at his dojo! Anytime we can get a few minutes of the master dispensing pearls of ancient Far East wisdom while beating up watermelons, are minutes that families treasure. I can’t actually remember anything the Master said during his class, but I’m pretty sure it involved Chi. I do recall that it did involve a guy getting punched through a wall by Seagal.

If you think that whupping melons and crippling students is the best that Steve has to offer in this movie, you must thinking of some guy with a girl’s name like Jean-Claude or Dolph. See, Steve does all of this before some retard goes and kidnaps his daughter! Remember how he tore Poland a new poopshoot when they kidnapped his pen pal in Out Of Reach? That was just over some chick he wrote letters to that another guy’s voice read in Seagal’s head for him! Once Steve’s done retrieving his daughter, Romania’s going to be sorry that the Iron Curtain ever fell. Joe Romania will be stumbling over bullet-ridden bodies on his way to work and thinking “you know, that Nicolae Ceausescu wasn’t really that bad.”

What’s bad news for the skeevy Romanians is of course good news for Seagal fans! But why would an action-god like Steve be slumming in some nothing country that’s so scuzzy they don’t even try to pretend it’s someplace else? It all involves his daughter Amanda spending some time with her grandfather since that’s where Steve’s dead wife was from.

What sounds like a lame tearjerker where Seagal’s daughter learns how to let go of her dead mother and live again is thankfully really about how Seagal’s father-in-law stole information on a super-duper-deadly virus and planted it on Steve, then got blown up in a car, but actually didn’t get blown up in a car so that he could come back to doublecross Steve at the end of the movie all while Steve is shooting CIA agents, Romanian cops, Russian mobsters, and torturing the sexy taxi cab driver who nabbed his daughter but later turns into his sexy friend.

Yes, I know it sounds awesome enough, but does the ass kick on the page materialize as ass kick on the screen? Let me put it this way, if I was Seagal and you were at my dojo and you’d asked me that question, you find yourself picking chunks of wall out of your spleen and wishing I hadn’t run out of watermelons to train with!

Not only does everything you read and imagine transpire, there’s plenty of stuff you couldn’t even begin to imagine that goes on! Like that one time that Steve fought a helicopter gunship! By himself! With just his Glock! He keeps shooting at it until it blows up, then he gets back in his taxi and speeds off to the next gunfight! Just another day at the office!

Steve even goes undercover as a guy looking for drugs and women in an effort to apparently steal some money for some reason. I wasn’t really clear on exactly why we were busting up some drug/whorehouse and pocketing a bunch of cash, but that was probably because I wasn’t allowing my Chi to be centered properly. And when I say he goes undercover, I mean he stiffly announces “I want to party” and that he’s looking for drugs and women.

Guess what Seagal’s idea of a party is? Dudes getting spun around in the air, thrown into and through furniture, shot, punched, kicked – the usual. There’s a guy who’s wearing a mask because of a freebasing accident and when the mask gets ripped off and Seagal gets a good look at him, he declares “that’s not a freebasing accident, that’s syphilis!” And then snaps his neck! Come on, Steve! Leave something in the tank for the big finish!

You mean the big finish in the Bucharest Public Library? That’s right, Seagal arranges to exchange the data on the killer virus for his daughter at the library! Take a minute to imagine how this ends up going down. Did your mind’s eye see Steve shooting everyone? If not, you need to go all the way back to Above the Law and start your training over. I’m a greedy bastard though, so even as books and CIA agents are getting shot and kids are running screaming from the reading room, I found myself hoping for a couple of more bloody showdowns.

As luck would have it, I must have re-centered my Chi because I got two more instances of Seagal vaguely scowling his jowls through about three more killings. You’ve got two Russian pukefaces declaring that they have Seagal in what us Americans call a Mexican standoff. Result? One guy gets shot, the other guy gets his eyes punched out of freaking face by Steve! He’s hilariously left rolling around on the floor trying to find a gun while Seagal just hustles off to the ultimate confrontation with his traitorous father-in-law.

That was a good one as well because even though it looks like Seagal is in a tight spot, he reminds his erstwhile relative that “it’s not over until the wolf howls!” Seagal then deploys the Superpunch he demonstrated on his hapless dojo student at the beginning of the movie which sends pops flying across the room into a wall where he leaves a big bloody smear! Hey, I think I hear something. Yep. That’s the wolf howling, you pud!

Without a doubt the finest Seagal feature of 2006, though depending on the day you ask me, I may also give that honor to Attack Force or Mercenary For Justice since Steve kills buttloads of people in them, too.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

It’s really only a token gesture on Seagal’s part since the old timer who’s going to fix his cabinets will likely be dead of kidney failure since he’s using Seagal’s patented diet and vitamin regimen instead of going to those big city doctors who want to put him on dialysis. Of course nowadays, the old fart could just knock back a six pack of Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt Energy Drink and be fixed right up.

Dr. Steve lives a peaceful life with his country practice, ranch, daughter, and crusty cowhand Frank (L.Q. Jones of The Beast Within). The beauty of his country practice is that he doesn’t just confine his jibber jabber about natural healing to the ignorant townspeople. He also goes around sticking cows and horses with his jungle juice whenever Old Paint goes down with a bout of the Hershey Squirts.

In fact, while your average cliched Seagal flick may begin with some kind of shootout, drug deal or Nam flashback, this one has Dr. Steve saving the cutest little pony you have ever seen! Why, when I saw that chunky bastard riding his horse while carrying this itty bitty pony, I knew that if I died right then and there that I wouldn’t mind at all, because what else is there that the cinema has to offer after that?

But dang, that why’s they got those suicide prevention hotlines! Just when you think your life’s complete, that you’ve seen it all and done it all, Dr. Steve turns out to be living right next to a militia compound! And that militia compound is right in the middle of a standoff with the federal government!

And the militia has some stolen NAM-37 biological warfare agent that they’re going to unleash on the unsuspecting rubes of Ennis, Montana! What’s a simple country doctor supposed to do once Floyd, the militia leader spits some NAM-37 in the face of the local judge and turns an idyllic western paradise into a sweaty, open-sored hotzone?

There’s only two things that Dr. Steve knows how to do better than any man alive – cure plagues and kick ass! As it turns out, before Dr. Steve began dispensing wisdom to his daughter at the breakfast table about how horses are braver than people because they want to die alone, he was the best biological warfare guy in the CIA!

But when the government wouldn’t listen to him and destroy their stockpile of killer germs, he turned in his badge and quit the force! You see, all that stuff he was doing with the CIA was to protect America against foreign germ attacks, not to create weapons of mass destruction. How could he anticipate that the military would let it get stolen and sold to a militia that lived right next door to him? You can’t blame Dr. Steve for that!

The militia’s plan (whatever it was) hits a speedbump when the antidote they’re planning to use on themselves turns out not to work! And it’s the same antidote that the government goons in hazmat suits are trying to use on the townspeople to stop NAM-37!

The only hope seems to lie with the one person who was exposed to the germ but didn’t get sick Guess who that is? Dr. Steve’s daughter! Dr. Steve also never gets sick, but no one seems to notice that until almost the end of the movie. In any case, Dr. Steve and his daughter escape the militia and head up into the mountains to hole up with Grandpa!

Grandpa? Who gives a crud about some old grandpa? Well, just like Dr. Steve has secret kung fu/scientific research powers, so does Grandpa have his own super duper abilities!

Grandpa is actually a Blackfoot Indian and you know what that means – he’s an expert in the Old Ways! This means he knows all about local plants and is able to advise Dr. Steve that chasing knowledge is like chasing deer or some such nonsense. Dr. Steve though is only at Grandpa’s to dump his daughter off on his way to the secret underground government lab he used to work at.

Once in the underground lab, you get to see a Dr. Steve you’ve never seen before. No longer will his karate chops and kung jitsu be of any use! In this arena, Dr. Steve’s mind must become the ultimate weapon! If it requires Seagal to wear eyeglasses and peer into microscopes, so be it! No sacrifice is too great, no challenge too tough!

Now grasshopper, you must endure…the research montage! Beakers are shaken! Colored liquids are created! Labs are torn up in frustration! And finally, Dr. Steve must stand dejectedly in a hallway full of stiffs before the big breakthrough comes!

It was Grandpa’s wildflower tea! Tea that Dr. Steve and his daughter had been drinking! Take that newfangled government doctors! Old Ways owns your sorry butts!

What’s awesome about this is that this allows the movie to end with military helicopters dropping flower petals all over the town! Grandpa even comes down from his mountain retreat to town to check things out! Me and Dr. Steve never thought we’d live to see the day!

Dr. Steve does manage to shoot some militia men and stab their leader in the head with the stem of a wine glass, but I think you’ll agree that that’s strictly bonus material in this one! Certain to inspire many viewers to become immunologists and/or Blackfoot Indians.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Out Of Reach sees Steve jet off to his most exotic locale (and apparently the home country of a lot of the budget) ever! To paraphrase the guy at the airport, “what is your business in Poland, Mr. Seagal? Business or pleasure? Or a sword fight to the death?”

The climatic sword fight though is only one of many memorable moments in a movie that punches all the right Seagal-Straight-to-Video buttons. Puffed up action hero? Check. Lots of people getting shot? Check. Poorly shot tae kwan fu fights? Double check! Seagal playing a former CIA employee (his old Company ID actually identified it as something called the CSA, but you know how tricky those black ops types are)? Mega check!

All the pieces for 90 minutes of Seagal wandering slowly around various locations, squinting, frowning, and occasionally shooting a guy fifty times are in place! All that remains are the tasty details to flesh out the action. And the details this time around are simply delicious!

The opening scene shows Seagal hanging out in a forest rescuing some kind of bird from a trap and nursing it back to health! As nifty as helping out his forest friends is, you can’t very well build up a lot of drama by having him fly to Poland to rescue a raccoon from terrorists, can you?

This is where Seagal’s pen pal comes into play. Pen pal? What, you don’t think that a guy who used to do a lot of dirty work for the Company can’t try to find a little peace by doing something good for someone else? And who better (and more sympathetic) than a Polish orphan girl with a better command of the English language and the written word than Seagal himself?

The letters between these two are read to us by having each character do some voice overs. The interesting thing about this is that when Seagal is silently reading the letters and we hear the voice in his head reading them, it’s not his voice! Some other dude’s voice has been dubbed in instead of Steve’s!

A more risky move creatively speaking was when once in awhile during the film, Seagal would suddenly start speaking in another voice out loud to other characters! Some may complain that Seagal was too lazy to go back and do some redubbing, but I like to think it was part of his covert operation training that allowed him to switch between different voices as a way to maintain his cover and confound his foes.

Seagal’s pen pal goes and gets herself kidnapped by some dirtbags intent on selling her and some of her orphan buddies to the highest bidder. Right about this time, Seagal’s log cabin is invaded by his former employers from the Company and they try to take him into custody!

Seagal breaks a few elbows and goes deep undercover as a French-Canadian (I think) guy long enough to get a suspicious letter from the orphanage stating that his pen pal can’t write to him anymore.

Steve heads to Poland to investigate and follows one vague clue after another and closes in on the kidnappers while getting help from a lady cop and a orphan boy who was friends with Seagal’s pen pal.

A lot of the movie can be enjoyed by snoozing until you hear loud noises. The loud noises signal action of some sort, usually a gun battle, but you also should be alert during a few key quiet scenes. Like the one where Seagal takes his investigation into the poshest whorehouse in Warsaw. And then arranges for a giant shootout there. (After buying a cache of weapons for the lady cop’s bartender uncle – these movies really demonstrate good economical plotting!)

But if you only woke up for that, you would have missed the cat and mouse game Seagal engaged the bad guys with at…the Turkish Embassy Ball! This gala social event of the season was no doubt highlighted by the coded message that Seagal’s pen pal left him on a tray of hors d’oeuvres!

The sword fight at the conclusion of the film follows a brief hand-to-hand fight that sees Seagal get elbowed in the gut a few times which causes him to momentarily stagger and the camera to briefly shift in and out of focus.

Not to worry though because Seagal catches his breath (they probably had to film that scene the next day) grabs a sword and heads off to his showdown which ends with Seagal slicing a guy to death while his pen pal watches in stunned silence. Just for good measure, Seagal maintains a dramatic post-slicing samurai pose for a really long time.

Director Po-Chih Leong knows that a good finish will often times refer back to a film’s beginning, thus we are treated to a postcard update to Poland from the orphans to the lady cop stating that they are living with Steve and having fun. They go on to say that Steve spends most of his time alone in the forest rescuing injured animals. Then movie then closes with a still shot of Seagal’s jowly face superimposed with an image of a bird that he rescued.

Admit it – you wish you were Seagal. But without the gut. And without that weird voice in his head that reads his letters for him.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Throw in that movie where he teamed up with that annoying little Asian kid and that other movie where he teamed up with that annoying old Sean Connery and you’ve got a series of movies no real man should ever be caught dead admitting to watching, let alone liking. But what’s a real hoss like you or me to do when we’re after an old fashioned rip-snorting ass whip archeologist adventure flick?

To paraphrase the great philosopher Magic 8 Ball, “all signs point to Seagal!” Proving that old theater saying that there are no bad parts only bad actors in black trenchcoats with matted down hair, Seagal brings to life Yale University’s highest decorated archeologist in an adventure so Seagalian in scope that the same back alley in Sofia, Bulgaria played the Chinatowns of at least three different countries!

And when I say he brings Professor Robert Burns to life, I mean, he’s squatting down in the dirt somewhere in China, decked out in his leather trenchcoat, dusting off and packing up ancient relics!

And just like the real life archeologists from Yale, he wears a red silk pajama top to accept the most prestigious award in archeology! He also had some other dude dub most of his acceptance speech which just goes to show the humility the man has!

It’s obvious that’s he better dressed than Indiana Jones, but does he spend the whole movie accepting kudos from other eggheads or does he have to take on and kill the heads of every Chinese Tong in existence all in an effort to get revenge for his wife getting blown up in their own house?

Good question! Before we get to that though, we need to have Seagal’s archeology assistant killed off, Seagal framed for some drug smuggling, sent to Chinese prison, make friends with his black cellmate (an inspiring four second scene), get sprung by the DEA in an effort to use him as bait to draw out the real villains, and have a stick fight with some evil monks at a memorial service!

Here’s the thing about Seagal – even after all of this happens, when he meets up with the bad guys at a restaurant, he offers to stay out of their business if they leave him alone.

See, this guy is an intelligent, educated man who understands that violence is ultimately futile in resolving conflicts. But then these guys go and threaten to kill his dog and his wife!

His dog? What do you think Roy Rogers would have done if some cattle rustler threatened to kill Trigger? Or if some outlaw tried to gut Tonto? Would the Lone Ranger just have shrugged it off and gone back to eating his dinner?

Or, would he have beat the piss out of the guy, his friends, shot the joint up and then shoved the gun into the guy’s stomach and aerated his midsection? What I loved about all this was that this is how the good professor reacted before they killed his wife!

Once his wife dies, Seagal visits the father of his assistant who was also killed and swears a vow to get revenge for the death of their loved ones.

But any lame action hero can swear vengeance when someone close gets offed. It’s in the job description. Seagal is all about pushing the boundaries of the genre though.

From his creative use of stunt doubles, other guys dubbing his voice, to wearing the same clothes and facial expression in every single film, his indistinguishable direct-to-video action movies always give the viewer something a little different each time. Usually it’s just the name of his character, but in this movie, he gives himself a deadline for getting revenge! He’s going to have it done by the end of the week, before the funerals of his dead loved ones!

Normally, you would think the rest of the movie would showcase Seagal’s desperate race against time, but Seagal just stiffly walks from Chinese restaurant to Chinese laundry to Chinese trucking company killing everyone he finds.

In one particularly memorable sequence, he fights a guy who can spin around in the air, walk on walls and do all sorts of tricks from the monkey-fu school of martial arts. Ultimately, Seagal catches this kung fool in a towel and snaps his neck, but I’m sure it broke the monotony of fighting guys with guns and swords.

There are two DEA agents trailing Seagal which provides one of them the opportunity to do some dramatic narration about what is happening. She says stuff like “he was like a ghost” even as she was checking out this office he completely demolished while chucking a guy out the window to the street below.

She also pointed out that she never met anyone like Seagal before and doubted that she would in the future either. Really? You don’t think you’ll ever know another guy who was a master art thief, spent seven years in prison, got his doctorate in archeology while in prison, created a new identity upon his release, and somehow found a way to become an expert in Chinese and become an unstoppable killing machine? I ran into three of those guys at the grocery store this week alone!

Some might choose to criticize the movie’s overuse of slow motion, fast motion, animated bullets, amateurish editing tricks, and absurdly bad special effects that make you wonder if they were trying to actually affect some sort of hyper-stylized look, but they would be foolishly overlooking the fact that the movie contained more Seagal-imparted carnage than you really deserve in any given hour and a half of your life.

Besides, when Seagal takes a sword, throws it out a second story window at a guy in the street and decapitates him, do you have any right to complain about anything else in the movie?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Mercenary For Justice is all about highlighting the best of Seagal’s recent oeuvre of little-seen action flicks where the budgets consist of two items – Seagal (and his army of stand-ins, stuntmen, dubbers, and guys that make his full length leather trench coats) and ammo – and taking it to the next level! An example would be the big fight in the restaurant bathroom.

A lot of cheesy low rent merc movies would use the toilet to give the bad guy a swirlie. That’s what it’s there for, right? And make no mistake, Seagal is a pro and it isn’t long before he’s taking a break from snapping various joints and ramming this dude’s head into mirrors to give him nice hard dunking. But Seagal has trained in the Far East and knows the secrets of the ancient masters so he chucks this dumb bastard into the urinals as well!

Steve knows though that part of any good potty fight is selling it once it’s finished. Just as he’s finished thrashing and flushing this loser, one of the mercs he was at dinner with comes in and surveys the damage. Steve’s response? “That’s work.”

Then he goes on to ask the other merc if he’s from Detroit and wouldn’t you know it but Steve is a Michigan boy as well and let’s go get a drink and Steve’s buying, etc. And to make sure you get the full sense what sort of movie we’re dealing with, the other merc’s name is Bulldog.

As all the classic merc movies do, this one starts with a mission gone tits up the to the moon! The only reason Steve was willing to go on the mission was because his good buddy Radio asked him to.

Considering the mess that Radio gets Steve into, this may be the same Radio from that movie about the retarded football player named Radio. It goes without saying that the no name dude playing Radio in this movie is a much better actor than Cuba Gooding, Jr.

So just what sort of crazy-assed mission has Radio signed us up for? Well, after Steve singled-handedly tore up Uruguay in Submerged, Poland in Out Of Reach and Las Vegas in Today You Die, he finds himself fighting the French army in the island nation of Galmoral!

While Galmoral sounds a bit like the sort of place that you would expect to see Seagal using his kung fu on hobbits and orcs, it’s really just some African cesspool that needs liberating from some despot or other.

Now while Seagal himself wasn’t the one that kidnapped the French ambassador, his wife, children and staff and he also wasn’t the one who blew their truck up sending their shattered bodies into the Galmoralian sky, they were members of his merc team.

Just so you don’t think Seagal condones that sort of behavior, he does threaten to kill the crazy South Africans who did it. He ultimately decides against it, but you can bet there was probably a pretty stern lecture in the helicopter as they were escaping the war zone.

It turns out the mission was done at the behest of some crooked CIA types and Seagal and his crew were left hung out to dry. Radio buys the farm on the mission and Seagal stupidly promises to take care of Radio’s wife and kid. It isn’t more than ten minutes later before Radio’s family gets kidnapped so that Seagal will be forced to take on one more merc mission, this time to bust a Greek arms dealer’s son out of a South African prison!

And not just any prison, but one that is described as not quite as tough as Leavenworth, but certainly the toughest in South Africa! And they have only four days to get the job done before the Greek is extradited to the U.S. You can practically sense Seagal yawning. “Four days? Hell, I just broke out of a U.S. prison in Today You Die and it took like two minutes!”

As it turns out, Seagal wasn’t going to be busting into any scuzzy foreign prison! While the crazy South Africans are breaking into the prison, Seagal is safely ensconced in some high tech bank breaking into their computer system!

But don’t think Steve is missing out on any action. He hangs around the bank making all sorts of transactions for so long that the cops finally catch on and start shooting. Guess who ends up walking out of the bank smiling while stepping over about fifty bodies?

Seagal is the picture of the professional merc throughout the film. Every ten minutes when his boss figures out Steve’s latest double cross, he threatens to kill Radio’s family, but Seagal blows him off, blithely announcing he needs “proof of life” before he can take any further action on the mission.

At the end of the movie, he lets his boss drive off prompting complaints from the surviving mercs including a comment regarding the boss’s less than manly personality. Seagal responds, “I thought he had an explosive personality.” Then he pushes the detonator in his hand and blows up his boss inside his car leaving Seagal to chuckle and remark “I said ‘had’!” That Seagal was always the class clown at merc school!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see a Seagal movie, I’m looking for him to mete out justice and/or vengeance as often and as flamboyantly as possible. And it’s not like Seagal is just some boring killing machine who can’t be touched. He even got kicked in the head in this one!

After a completely pointless prologue that sees Steve in Thailand on a mission getting his partner, NFL superstar Eddie George, killed because Steve couldn’t stand by and watch a native girl get raped, we find Steve leading a peaceful life as a simple owner of a Tokyo sword store. When you read that last sentence, which part of it made you think this was surely the best Seagal movie of 2005? Was it the part about him going on a covert op with a Heisman Trophy winner? Or the part that Steve has unlimited access to lots of swords?

Steve’s unassuming life as a dealer in personal cutlery is interrupted when a Japanese politician is assassinated and his old CIA boss calls him up asking Steve to investigate. Just to make sure that things do not progress smoothly, Steve is saddled with a rookie FBI field agent.

This guy manages to embarrass himself at every juncture with his ignorance of the culture and his utter lack of investigative skills. (He searches the bad guys’ office in broad daylight by walking in the front door and keeps on searching until they eventually show up and catch him.)

Needless to say, Steve isn’t really banging on doors looking for the guy when he disappears about half way through the movie after having his neck snapped.

Besides, Steve has an important case to crack. It’s one I like to call, “The Case of Steve Getting Himself Laid.” There’s this gal that he uses to get information from at a local club and it’s during a walk through a fancy Japanese garden that Steve and her sit down on a park bench and he proposes to her! Then they pinky-swear that they will always be together! Until such time as a Yakuza thug disembowels her!

That can’t really qualify as a spoiler because Seagal having a wife in these movies is about like James Bond having a wife. Besides, when your fiancee gets brutally murdered, it just gives you the extra motivation to make sure your showdown with the bad guys is turned up to that next level. And you can only imagine the motivation Seagal has when he finds the killer and that scum is wearing the antique hair clip (Edo Period) that Seagal gave his woman as an engagement present, in his cowboy hat!

When he isn’t out getting engaged and sending his partner off on some cushy surveillance gig to get killed, Seagal is trying to track down who was behind the murder of a prominent Japanese government official. His investigation sees him having talks with various people that involve bowing, referring to them as “sensei”, and sitting through one of those Japanese plays where the women wear all that white face paint and smile a lot.

He also manages to pick up a couple of spare partners to replace the old murdered ones. One is the daughter of an old friend who is an expert with the sword and the other is a tattoo artist. In Japanese culture, the tattoo artist is kind of like one of our Delta Force guys.

While much of the violence committed by Seagal doesn’t occur until the final third of the movie, the scenes of him meeting with various folks and gathering intel are interspersed with scenes of Yakuza thugs wasting other Yakuza thugs. One guy even cuts his own pinkie off to show his sorrow for getting his butt kicked by Seagal earlier and all he gets for his efforts is shot dead!

It turns out that the killing of the Japanese politician was to divert attention from the fact that one of the up and coming Yakuza guys is making a power play against the old guard and is also forging an alliance with the Chinese Tongs to have better access to the heroin trade originating in the Golden Triangle!

If it wasn’t for the fact that Steve’s girlfriend got whacked thus freeing him up from awkward love scenes and giving him plenty of time to mount an assault on the bad guy’s temple hideout, I’d be a little worried!

Everything you love about Seagal is on fire in this movie! His pony tail looks nice and full, his long black trench coat is good and shiny, and most mysterious of all, his Japanese language skills far surpass his English!

I don’t know any Japanese so I’ll have to take the subtitles at face value when it says that Steve is saying stuff like “I’m going to beat your head in” right before he slashes a guy over the top of his head with a sword, but Steve sounded very confident in his diction.

There’s even time for some pathos when Steve makes a sad trip back to the Japanese garden where he proposed to his lady friend. He reenacts the pinky-swearing scene with a vision of his dead gal pal, but she fades out and leaves Steve holding up his pinky in mid air all alone!

By the time Steve started singing the song playing over the end credits, I was wondering if there was anything he couldn’t do! Well, other than doing a love scene without his large, baggy shirt on, but give him credit for knowing his limitations.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

The answer to that question can be found in a little story I’m fond of calling “A Tale of Two Seagals.” The first Seagal was all about a guy whupping up on trash with his super hot Aikido moves. Above the Law, Hard to Kill, and Marked For Death are unquestionably what passes for the Seagal classics of the big screen. The Under Siege movies came next (with a turd or two sprinkled in along the way) followed up by the ill-advised teaming with one of those Wayans brothers in The Glimmer Man. Just to make sure we knew the end of Seagal 1.0 was finished, he then made a few movies with some rappers.

But never fear Seagalaholics! Seagal 2.0 (later 3XL) fired up immediately thereafter and he and his fans gladly traded big screen stardom in one crappy movie every year or so for three or four mega awesome straight to home video action flicks per year!

With such a prodigious output, it was inevitable that Steve would at the very least accidentally make a sequel somewhere in there. And that’s just what Black Dawn is!

After the apparent worldwide, but certainly obscure, success of The Foreigner, the opportunity to not have to think up a new name for Seagal’s character in one of his 2005 movies along with having a ready made back story and a flashback gunfight to edit into the new film for a cheap action sequence was just too good not to pass up!

But if you think that Seagal is going to use this sequel as an excuse to let his audience down by giving them the same old cruddy action movie, you would be wrong. Or as Seagal might mumble in one of his movies, “dead wrong.”

First of all, the role gave him an opportunity to stretch and by that I mean an opportunity to stretch his three piece suits with his stomach. It’s a thankful change from those weird black quilted floor length jackets he usually favors.

Further testing his acting chops, he also does a lot of scenes sitting down. Checking schematics of a nuclear device at a laptop? Sitting down. Examining mail and making a cell phone call that results in a critical clue to the bad guys’ whereabouts? Relaxing on a couch. Driving the dumptruck through town while engaged in a gun battle with the bad guys? He’s riding in the cab, but turns it up a notch by making steering motions!

And how about flying the helicopter out to sea to dump the nuclear device where it harmlessly detonates in the ocean, its radiation safely contained to the miles and miles of water off the coast of Los Angeles? Sitting in the pilot’s chair, and letting out a sigh of relief that all goes as planned!

To be fair, the stuntmen who are forced wear Seagal wigs do get a mild workout when they crash through a window, or slide around on top of the dumptruck, but you can’t expect a superstar like Steve to waste his time doing that when he has an important scene harassing a computer nerd to get some more vital information for something or other. A real action hero always knows when to delegate.

So just what was Cold up to this time around? Beats me! He’s a CIA agent who’s so deep undercover none of the other CIA people knew what he was doing or whose side he was on!

He breaks out a kingpin of crime from prison and gets involved with procuring a nuclear device from a Russian scientist with an eye toward turning around and selling it to some Chechen rebels who want to nuke L.A. They also need to get some plutonium from a CIA agent who is undercover at the local plutonium plant.

To make sure that Steve doesn’t have to strain himself too much, they team him up with a lady CIA agent whom he mentored years ago. Just for good measure, it turns out that her current CIA boss was behind everything.

I was never real sure why anyone was doing anything or what exactly Seagal’s plan was initially (he had to break his cover to save his protege), but you know those crazy Chechens. Nothing will show their Russian oppressors they mean business like making L.A. a radioactive wasteland.

Of course that made only slightly more sense than the scene at the end of the film where the CIA guy kills the Chechens because it was his idea and he wanted to be the one to set the bomb off, though he had zero reason to do this.

While there is a minimal amount of Seagal martial arts moments (and what there is looks to be purposely poorly photographed – probably so as not to expose Seagal’s secrets to any would-be terrorists watching), lots of people get shot and the dumptruck chase scene is a nice demonstration of callous destruction, so it has that going for it.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Of course, he really doesn’t care all that much; saving Paris is just an unfortunate by-product of getting revenge for the murders of his strike team at the beginning of the film.  In fact, since Steve was actually shooting this movie in Romania and nowhere near Paris, he might not have even been aware that Attack Force took place in Paris. Same with his stunt doubles and the guy dubbing his voice about one-third of the time.

We may as well get the business of the stunt doubles and dubbing out of the way so that all these wuss Seagal haters can be shut up once and for all.  The thing you need to understand about Seagal is that when you hire Seagal for a movie, you’re not just hiring some dude who’s bloated up a like a dead raccoon along the highway.  You’re actually hiring what I like to call “Team Seagal.”

Team Seagal is a veritable strike force of action movie star accoutrements.  You get Steve, his various stunt doubles, dialogue replacement guy, black leather trenchcoat assistant, eight personal chefs with training from Arby’s, and his ponytail wrangler.  Team Seagal is set up so that they can airdropped into a direct-to-DVD action movie set just as soon as the foreign investors’ check clears.

The thing that a lot of folks lose sight of when the criticize Seagal for this, is that he’s doing it for the fans. Attack Force was his third film of 2006 and he made four more in 2005.  Do you think you’d be getting all this Seagal goodness if he was forced to hang around the set all day doing stupid stuff like his own stunts and reading his own lines?

Great leaders are all about setting priorities and big Steve knows that sometimes a bunch of dialogue that doesn’t make any sense anyway would be just as well off being spewed out by some guy who doesn’t sound anything like him.

Besides, that keeps Steve fresh to make those inscrutable expressions during fight scenes and any other scene where he has to stand awkwardly around while someone else is jabberjawing away about some deadly scheme he needs to thwart.

This time around there’s a drug being funded by the U.S. military called CTX that makes people really strong and homicidal.  Their homicidal tendencies tend to manifest themselves in one of two ways.

First, these people run around trying to stab and slice you with various knives and when they aren’t doing that, they kick/punch/throw you through brick walls.  This results in a lot of clumsy shots of people flying through flimsy-looking walls.

One time, Seagal’s female partner got chucked straight through three walls!  The only harm she suffered was a little dust on her blouse which was quite a relief because it meant she was still available to get stabbed to death at the end of the movie.

Before Steve can get down to brass tacks with the scum who are trying to poison the water supply with CTX, he has to contend with the U.S. military!  They don’t want anything to come out about CTX that might link them to it and with Seagal digging for answers (this usually involves him making a cell phone call and meeting his lady friend in the corner cafe), it’s time to send in a strike team to clean things up!

Once the military tires of Seagal killing their strike teams, they finally agree to work with him to bring this CTX crisis under control.

With Seagal’s own strike team being killed at the beginning of this mess, he gets outfitted with a brand new Attack Force!  Attack Force is some guys dressed up in black gear who run around using hand signals when clearing out the old cathedral where the bad guys are holed up.

One of the people on Attack Force is Seagal’s buddy Duane.  Duane is characterized by his attempts to be a bad ass while constantly asking Seagal if they really have a chance.

Seagal of course blandly pooh-poohs any notion that there’s anything to be concerned about even though the CTX has already infected an entire village of people.  To Steve, containing an outbreak of a deadly drug that turns people into unstoppable killers is no more exciting that heading out to Mickey D’s to pick up four or five McRibs.

Steve does get roused enough periodically to murder several people.  There’s a drugged-up chick he’s got strapped down to a chair that he’s interrogating and she makes the mistake of breaking one of her hands free and tries to choke Steve with it.  Result?  Stabbed in the gut!

There’s the people that Steve sees are infected with CTX.  Shot dead.  You’ve also got some military types who are trying to take Steve’s safehouse down while Steve sneaks up from the other side of the house.  Two nice, beautiful head shots!

He also manages to cut a really big ass gouge in some broad’s chest before ultimately wiping her out for good.

And finally there’s the chief bad guy.  Somehow, Steve needs to stab this guy through the top of his head twice and then chuck him down a hallway and some stairs!

Attack Force is easily one of the best three movies Seagal made in 2006.  Dispensing with the need for anything resembling an intelligible story, competent camera work, convincing locations, actors who are anything more than a bullseye to Steve and his blades, and music that isn’t simply a collection of unconnected sounds, Attack Force smartly positions itself as the best Seagal movie where lots of people get stabbed.  Frankly, I was inspired to stab myself a couple of times after it concluded!

© 2011 MonsterHunter