A carnival of technology

If they think they can stop him, they’re dead wrong.

Rated R for violence and language

Starring Steven Seagal and Phillip Morris

Viewed 2005-09-20 by dcantrell, susi, dane, dshea, and mike

The direct-to-video action genre can be a very special place: unbound by the financial constraints of heavy marketing and the need to create a product with mass appeal, the writers and directors are left to their own devices, free to compose a product full of subtlety and creative energy that will be passed without expensive detour into the arms of appreciative fans. Direct to video is a place for art. Steven Seagal’s acting is not art.

Steven Seagal is no stranger to the world of direct-to-video potboilers—The Foreigner was the first of three that he made in 2003 alone—but he brings no big-budget versatility to the small screen. He has a single style, and we all saw that in Under Siege. To make matters worse, director Michael Oblowitz carries the delusion that he is making something cinematically beautiful. The laundry list of effects, inappropriate slow-motion scenes, fast flipping between close-up shots of tense moments, and overuse of the MidgetCam serve only to create tedium, not beauty. The highly stylized settings, though nice to watch, barely even evoke a sense of their location. Nearly every locale appears simply European, and the inconsistently applied captions only add to the confusion. Are they in Poland again? Are they back in France? I don’t know, but everyone’s still smoking, so it must be Europe.

The ubiquitous smoking was annoying, too. I normally don’t mind smoking in movies. Smoking is bad and will kill you, but Clint Eastwood would have been incomplete without his thin cigars, and Bogey rolled his own right there in the middle of The Maltese Falcon, so whatever; light ‘em if you got ‘em. But when the smoking is stretched to comical extremes in an ostensibly serious movie, then perhaps there’s a problem. How are you supposed to sneak up on someone against the backdrop of Marlboro country? How can someone with a smoker’s lung capacity take a bullet and then run a mile? Are Luckies really a first-aid item?

The violence in the film was another annoyance. Action movies are supposed to be violent, sure, but the violence isn’t always supposed to be wanton. Perhaps there’s some Tarantino-esque “violence is everywhere, man” message being made, but I don’t like Tarantino, either. The only thing worse than a bad director is a knockoff of a bad director.

This movie was exhausting. What could have been a gory ballad of unattainable goals and a documentation of the harrowing world of the courier industry too quickly—and yet so slowly—devolved into a one-dimensional revenge flick. The item being delivered by Seagal, the foreigner, was revealed, the secret relationships were bared before the characters nearly as soon as the audience, and the secondary players were eliminated, leaving only Seagal and Sir Smokesalot among the characters who matter. If you want to see Seagal, watch Under Siege again.