Steven Seagal Movies (2003 - 2021) The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

[DrNgor]

Shadow Man (2006) - This is probably the most nonsensical of Seagal's 2000s output, and that includes the much-hated Attack Force. Seagal plays a former CIA agent (yawn!) who's now the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and an accomplished kung fu teacher. He's also a widower and a father (gotta like they follow up the scene of him telling his father-in-law that he misses his wife with one of his girlfriend getting undressed for him, giving the audience a nice long ass shot). While on holiday in Bucharest, his father-in-law (also a former agent) is killed by a car bomb and his daughter is kidnapped. What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase involving Seagal, the CIA, the American ambassador (Imelda Staunton of the fifth Harry Potter movie), corrupt Romanian cops, and the Russia mafia. And all this for a McGuffin that has to do with the MK Ultra project that historically was shut down in '73, but is still going on strong 33 years later.

The writing is such that we the audience don't even have the slightest idea what's going on and who anybody is until about 30 minutes in. There are your standard Seagal arms twists and wrist snapping, plus your equally-standard violent gunplay (watch for one fella who gets shot through the cheeks, leaving a small hole on one side a huge bloody wound on the other). Oh, and he gets to finish off one of the villains with the dreaded dim mak, or touch of death. I think my favorite part is when he does some old fashioned Casey Ryback weapon improvisation early on. Those scenes are always pretty fun. The car chases sometimes look okay, until you switch to the camera inside the car, which is so horribly back-projected that you think this is a parody of your typical Seagal action flick. There are a fair number of bare butts and breasts on display, plus one female character inexplicably tries to seduce Seagal in her bra. I guess he's moral enough to not accept it because...well...hot blonde girlfriend back in the States. Overall, not for the faint of heart.

[DrNgor]

Ticker (USA, 2001: Albert Pyun) - I feel bad writing a bad review of a film made a cult filmmaker the same year that he died. But this was bad enough in both subtle and egregious ways that I don't even have the mental energy to write a 1200-word review tearing it apart for my site. Tom Sizemore plays a cop who teams up with a bomb squad guru (Seagal) to take down an Irish mad bomber (Dennis Hopper, who filmed his scenes in a single day). The key to the case is a girl DOA's Jaime Pressley) that Sizemore apprehended during a raid on the villain's hideout.

The entire film was made over the course of 12 days and Pyun has denounced the final cut, complaining about the producers slashing the budget and meddling with his vision. I get the feeling that Pyun spent his career dealing with producers messing with his visions...and/or having paltry budgets to carry them out. Nas and Chilli (of the R&B group TLC) are given third and fourth billings in the opening credits, but only have two and one scenes, respectively. Ice-T, who was in Pyun's Mean Guns, shows up briefly as a terrorist, but doesn't seem to be around for the action sequence. Peter Greene (Under Siege 2: Dark Territory and the main villain in Jim Carrey's The Mask) plays a jerk-off cop, one of his few non-villain roles, apparently.

Seagal fights a little at the end, but the scenes are over-edited and badly photographed. Apparently, he didn't even want there to be a fight scene in it. Well, it shows. Oh, and I recognized Seagal in disguise during the blue's club sequence--although the exterior shots suggest it's a strip club. According to Pyun, Seagal's character was supposed to be a figment of Sizemore's imagination, which would explain all the flowery proverb dialog on Seagal's part.

There's something about the way the movie is filmed and edited that has no respect for space and the viewers' abilities to watch and place themselves mentally in any given scene. It's hard for me to explain, but scenes are shot from certain angles that don't really allow us to create an adequate mental map of the surroundings. Moreover, there often never seems to be any flow from one scene to another. It's the afternoon when they find the wreckage caused by the decoy bomb and Sizemore finds out the real one is at City Hall, but it's the middle of the night before the police arrive at the building. We talk about fight scenes in movies being edited with a hacksaw, but this is one of the movies where the entire film is shot and put together wrong. We're not talking MTV-style editing, but lots of little details are fudged, causing the whole movie to not gel. 

[laagi]

And here I was expecting something in the vein of this... call me a dreamer.

 

[One Armed Boxer]

On 7/16/2021 at 8:36 AM, DrNgor said:

Driven to Kill (2009) - aka Ruslan - Steven Seagal plays Ruslan, an ex-Russian mobster who now writes crime novels. His daughter, a prosecuting attorney, is engaged to 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. 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. Seagal has a lengthy knife fight at a strip club. It's no SPL, but it's pretty decent. He 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 climax is a shoot-out at a hospital, which is well shot by Seagal standards. It ends 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 violent way possible.

On the Seagal Sleaze-o-Meter, we have some bare breasts 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 don't think there is much titillation to be had. The movie also opens with Seagal's girlfriend (who's 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.

I got through watching this one recently as well (don't ask me how or why) and found it to be a semi-respectable entry in Seagal's 00's oeuvre. Full review treatment over at COF - 

https://cityonfire.com/driven-to-kill-2009-review-ruslan-steven-seagal/

[laagi]

3 hours ago, One Armed Boxer said:

I got through watching this one recently as well (don't ask me how or why) and found it to be a semi-respectable entry in Seagal's 00's oeuvre. Full review treatment over at COF - 

https://cityonfire.com/driven-to-kill-2009-review-ruslan-steven-seagal/

[CaldoTheKid]

What does everybody think about his TV shows Steven Seagal: Lawman and True Justice?

[laagi]

1 hour ago, CaldoTheKid said:

What does everybody think about his TV shows Steven Seagal: Lawman and True Justice?

Well if anything Tom Segura had to say about it (never gets old) is true sounds like it's definitely worth checking out for the "entertainment" alone.

 

[LoBo]

Never saw Lawman, but true justice was a poor series with poorly made fight scenes.