I had been watching a lot of Steven Seagal film reviews on Youtube. They were not good film reviews, but mostly just highlighting how lazy, nonsensical and bizarre his films are. After some Googling, I found that this is a film that almost perfectly captures that style of filmmaking. I had to give it a shot to see if Seagal's recent work is as bad as they say it is. Also note that not only does Steven Seagal star in this, he also wrote it, so it is truly his creation.
In short, yes, this movie is hilariously bad and filled with things that are just utterly bizarre. But if you want to watch an example of how hilariously bad filmmaking can get, then this is not a bad candidate.
Lets see, where do I even start (spoilers incoming).
The basic plot is that Steven Seagal is a hot shot (there are several scenes where other characters praise how awesome Seagal's character is) Memphis detective on the trail of two unconnected serial killers who like to kill beautiful young women. Yes you read that correctly, the film has two parallel but completely unconnected storylines. At no point do the two serial killer storylines in any way interact with one another. I think the only reason there were two of these put into the film was because with just one of them, there wasn't enough material to drag this out into a standard length 90-ish minute feature, so the writer (Seagal himself) just thought that lets just copy and paste the same storyline a second time into the film, with some modifications.
Seagal's character is one who in real life would be fired from the police on day 1. Every place he goes to, he starts to seemingly arbitrarily and with no justification just beating up or shooting people. People who have not done any crimes or endangered anyone, people who he's not even sure are the ones he's after, he just starts beating them up for no reason at all.
The production quality is decent at times, but then at others is a complete joke. The audio quality wavers up and down consistently, where characters in the exact same location are perfectly audible in one scene, and then the camera cuts to a different angle and you can barely understand anything at all. This isn't helped by Steven Seagal's insistence that he speak only in a mumbling fashion, and for some reason insists on doing an accent like he's African American which is just so bizarre. That's if he speaks himself at all, because large parts of Seagal's dialogue are dubbed over by someone else. And not just one person, there seem to be multiple voice actors jumping in and out of the film reading certain lines for him.
In fact Seagal's laziness isn't confined to speaking lines. The use of body doubles that look nothing like him for scenes that really don't need body doubles at all just adds more unintended hilarity to the movie. His laziness is also evident in the script, where numerous things that happen seem to do so for no reason, many things aren't explained at all or it seems like Seagal had an idea for why A leads to B, but it remained in his head and didn't make it into the script, leaving the viewer scratching their head as to why something happened.
The cherry on the cake is the ending. After the two serial killers are aprehended by Seagal's character, you'd think the movie would end, right? Nope. We then get a scene where he arrives at some mansion in what is presumably Eastern Europe or Russia with a luxury SUV, to meet his model-esque wife and two children (plus a nanny he's eyeing up). Leaving aside the question of how he manages to fund this expensive parallel life and family on the salary of a mid-level policeman, the entire thing has no connection whatsoever to the rest of the film. Like there was zero reason for it to be included, and zero things leading up to it. In fact the character had a girlfriend in Memphis as well, on top of this second family.
This hopefully gives you a flavour of the calibre of high quality filmmaking that Steven Seagal has been busy with these past years. I did get a lot of good laughs out of this film, but they were not intended as the movie takes itself very seriously.
A showcase of truly bizarre, lazy and nonsensical filmmaking. Watch this with your friends and have a good laugh.
In short, yes, this movie is hilariously bad and filled with things that are just utterly bizarre. But if you want to watch an example of how hilariously bad filmmaking can get, then this is not a bad candidate.
Lets see, where do I even start (spoilers incoming).
The basic plot is that Steven Seagal is a hot shot (there are several scenes where other characters praise how awesome Seagal's character is) Memphis detective on the trail of two unconnected serial killers who like to kill beautiful young women. Yes you read that correctly, the film has two parallel but completely unconnected storylines. At no point do the two serial killer storylines in any way interact with one another. I think the only reason there were two of these put into the film was because with just one of them, there wasn't enough material to drag this out into a standard length 90-ish minute feature, so the writer (Seagal himself) just thought that lets just copy and paste the same storyline a second time into the film, with some modifications.
Seagal's character is one who in real life would be fired from the police on day 1. Every place he goes to, he starts to seemingly arbitrarily and with no justification just beating up or shooting people. People who have not done any crimes or endangered anyone, people who he's not even sure are the ones he's after, he just starts beating them up for no reason at all.
The production quality is decent at times, but then at others is a complete joke. The audio quality wavers up and down consistently, where characters in the exact same location are perfectly audible in one scene, and then the camera cuts to a different angle and you can barely understand anything at all. This isn't helped by Steven Seagal's insistence that he speak only in a mumbling fashion, and for some reason insists on doing an accent like he's African American which is just so bizarre. That's if he speaks himself at all, because large parts of Seagal's dialogue are dubbed over by someone else. And not just one person, there seem to be multiple voice actors jumping in and out of the film reading certain lines for him.
In fact Seagal's laziness isn't confined to speaking lines. The use of body doubles that look nothing like him for scenes that really don't need body doubles at all just adds more unintended hilarity to the movie. His laziness is also evident in the script, where numerous things that happen seem to do so for no reason, many things aren't explained at all or it seems like Seagal had an idea for why A leads to B, but it remained in his head and didn't make it into the script, leaving the viewer scratching their head as to why something happened.
The cherry on the cake is the ending. After the two serial killers are aprehended by Seagal's character, you'd think the movie would end, right? Nope. We then get a scene where he arrives at some mansion in what is presumably Eastern Europe or Russia with a luxury SUV, to meet his model-esque wife and two children (plus a nanny he's eyeing up). Leaving aside the question of how he manages to fund this expensive parallel life and family on the salary of a mid-level policeman, the entire thing has no connection whatsoever to the rest of the film. Like there was zero reason for it to be included, and zero things leading up to it. In fact the character had a girlfriend in Memphis as well, on top of this second family.
This hopefully gives you a flavour of the calibre of high quality filmmaking that Steven Seagal has been busy with these past years. I did get a lot of good laughs out of this film, but they were not intended as the movie takes itself very seriously.
A showcase of truly bizarre, lazy and nonsensical filmmaking. Watch this with your friends and have a good laugh.