TIMES ONLINE
Films
May 01, 2003
Inaction man after a career boost
By Sean Macaulay
Profile: He came, he saw, he conked out - and that's Steven Seagal's career, more or less. Not that you'd guess from his website
WAS THERE EVER a more bone-headed self-regarding action star in the history of the movies than Steven Seagal, whose new movie, Half-Past Dead, is reviewed on page 12? He emerged at the tail end of the 1980s in the slipstream of the slipstream of action stars such as Arnie Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone — that is, chasing lesser action stars like Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. But even these stars boasted distinguishing features: Norris had a roundhouse kick and Van Damme had a leg split kick. All Seagal could offer was monosyllabic whispers and a ponytail.
But it didn’t matter, for his distinguishing feature was a hilariously unwavering self-assurance. Even after a string of flops and a general slide into low-budget B-movie hell, he remains undaunted. His website is a font of propaganda to make an Iraqi information minister blush. It describes him as “the 7th degree black belt Aikido master, the Movie Star, the Musician, the Buddhist Practitioner and Humanitarian”. Seagal, his cyber shrine tells us, is “the most overwhelmingly popular film star in recent motion picture history”. His last starring film, The Foreigner, went straight to video in America. Above the Law, Seagal’s starring debut in 1988, is hailed as “a stunning first effort”. The verdict of Halliwell’s Film Guide is “woodenly acted”.
As for Seagal’s music career, “in the US and internationally, audience reaction leaves no doubt that he is a consummate musician and performer”. Seagal and his acoustic guitar once received a Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Screen Couple.
Onscreen, his impregnable persona is nearly always humourless. A mild, slightly bored squint is his face in repose as he waits for the bad guys to finish their threats before he gets on with dispensing justice. A mild, slightly less bored squint is his face as he courts the single mother/tragically young widow/wholesome woman in peril. The introduction of romantic sub-plots was a belated attempt in the 1990s to widen Seagal’s appeal.
He got his start in police thrillers with anti-establishment attitude and occasional ethnic colouring. He played maverick “go-it-alone” cops with names like Nico Toscani and Mason Storm, silent, forbidding men who could disarm whole drug cartels armed only with a ponytail and the mysteries of the East. But the attempt to humanise Seagal was a miscalculation, and not just because of his vow-of-poverty acting style. Like most tough guys in simple-minded action fantasies, Seagal’s constituency is mostly adolescent males. He appeals to them because he is physically invulnerable but also because he has no obligation to show emotion. He is simply too cool to have to show he cares.
In his prime, Seagal took this undemonstrativeness to Zen-like heights. He became too cool to show he was alive. Such stoicism, when allied to his absurd physical prowess, becomes something close to comic genius. If Seagal wants to revitalise his career, he could do worse than become the deadpan heir to Leslie Nielsen’s sublimely hapless detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin in the Naked Gun comedies. It is impressive how Seagal keeps a straight face, especially in his latter films, where he moves slowly or not at all, and yet is still depicted as being capable of terrorising an alley full of goons with a few raspy threats.
Seagal did enter unique territory when he paired his violent on-screen image with his lifelong quest for enlightenment. He was an early student of Eastern culture, settling in Japan in his late teens to teach martial arts. Despite his gun collection and a track record of impregnating women he’s not currently married to, this spiritual quest led him in 1997 to be anointed as a Tulku. As an honour, it is a little bit more than the honorary Oscar of Buddhism. The Tulku is considered to be a reincarnation of a Buddhist master — a 15th-century Tibetan lama in Seagal’s case — who vows to take rebirth out of compassion for the suffering of sentient beings.
After the surprise success of Under Siege in 1992, in which he played a navy cook who outwits some terrorists, Seagal was able to demonstrate this compassion by starring, producing and directing one of his dream projects, On Deadly Ground. It was a newly minted genre to fit in with his karmic belief in the eco-action movie (his website prefers the term “environmental epic”). Seagal plays the same violent, stoic hero as before — “he’s the kinda guy that’ll drink a gallon of gasoline just to p*** on your campfire” — but now he was helping Indians fight off an oil company.
This film was a colossal failure but Seagal persisted with his experiment, releasing Fire Down Below, in which he played a hard-hitting environmental protection agent, and The Patriot, in which he played a doctor battling a biological virus. Instead of an action climax, The Patriot featured army helicopters dropping life-saving wild flowers on to the gasping, poisoned locals. Again the box-office result was dismal.
Demonstrating the challenge of catering to bloodthirsty adolescent males while simultaneously preaching the values of tree-hugging, the eco-action genre means a hero who brutally stomps a racist bully and then holds back from delivering the final punch to inquire: “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” It also means the bully knows the answer: “Time.”
As the new millennium began, the biggest problem for Seagal was not his compassion or even his age (he turned 50 in 2001), it was his weight. Warner Brothers came up with a way to reinvent his career, putting him in gangsta thrillers surrounded by young black actors, but the studio would only hire him on condition that he lost weight. The target was 50lb — judging by the final product, Exit Wound, 30lb was as far as he got. But being held as the most out-of-shape action star in the world offers no worries to Seagal. He is hoping, he says, “to be known as a great writer and actor someday, rather than a sex symbol”. Not in this life.
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Films
May 01, 2003
Inaction man after a career boost
By Sean Macaulay
Profile: He came, he saw, he conked out - and that's Steven Seagal's career, more or less. Not that you'd guess from his website
WAS THERE EVER a more bone-headed self-regarding action star in the history of the movies than Steven Seagal, whose new movie, Half-Past Dead, is reviewed on page 12? He emerged at the tail end of the 1980s in the slipstream of the slipstream of action stars such as Arnie Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone — that is, chasing lesser action stars like Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. But even these stars boasted distinguishing features: Norris had a roundhouse kick and Van Damme had a leg split kick. All Seagal could offer was monosyllabic whispers and a ponytail.
But it didn’t matter, for his distinguishing feature was a hilariously unwavering self-assurance. Even after a string of flops and a general slide into low-budget B-movie hell, he remains undaunted. His website is a font of propaganda to make an Iraqi information minister blush. It describes him as “the 7th degree black belt Aikido master, the Movie Star, the Musician, the Buddhist Practitioner and Humanitarian”. Seagal, his cyber shrine tells us, is “the most overwhelmingly popular film star in recent motion picture history”. His last starring film, The Foreigner, went straight to video in America. Above the Law, Seagal’s starring debut in 1988, is hailed as “a stunning first effort”. The verdict of Halliwell’s Film Guide is “woodenly acted”.
As for Seagal’s music career, “in the US and internationally, audience reaction leaves no doubt that he is a consummate musician and performer”. Seagal and his acoustic guitar once received a Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Screen Couple.
Onscreen, his impregnable persona is nearly always humourless. A mild, slightly bored squint is his face in repose as he waits for the bad guys to finish their threats before he gets on with dispensing justice. A mild, slightly less bored squint is his face as he courts the single mother/tragically young widow/wholesome woman in peril. The introduction of romantic sub-plots was a belated attempt in the 1990s to widen Seagal’s appeal.
He got his start in police thrillers with anti-establishment attitude and occasional ethnic colouring. He played maverick “go-it-alone” cops with names like Nico Toscani and Mason Storm, silent, forbidding men who could disarm whole drug cartels armed only with a ponytail and the mysteries of the East. But the attempt to humanise Seagal was a miscalculation, and not just because of his vow-of-poverty acting style. Like most tough guys in simple-minded action fantasies, Seagal’s constituency is mostly adolescent males. He appeals to them because he is physically invulnerable but also because he has no obligation to show emotion. He is simply too cool to have to show he cares.
In his prime, Seagal took this undemonstrativeness to Zen-like heights. He became too cool to show he was alive. Such stoicism, when allied to his absurd physical prowess, becomes something close to comic genius. If Seagal wants to revitalise his career, he could do worse than become the deadpan heir to Leslie Nielsen’s sublimely hapless detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin in the Naked Gun comedies. It is impressive how Seagal keeps a straight face, especially in his latter films, where he moves slowly or not at all, and yet is still depicted as being capable of terrorising an alley full of goons with a few raspy threats.
Seagal did enter unique territory when he paired his violent on-screen image with his lifelong quest for enlightenment. He was an early student of Eastern culture, settling in Japan in his late teens to teach martial arts. Despite his gun collection and a track record of impregnating women he’s not currently married to, this spiritual quest led him in 1997 to be anointed as a Tulku. As an honour, it is a little bit more than the honorary Oscar of Buddhism. The Tulku is considered to be a reincarnation of a Buddhist master — a 15th-century Tibetan lama in Seagal’s case — who vows to take rebirth out of compassion for the suffering of sentient beings.
After the surprise success of Under Siege in 1992, in which he played a navy cook who outwits some terrorists, Seagal was able to demonstrate this compassion by starring, producing and directing one of his dream projects, On Deadly Ground. It was a newly minted genre to fit in with his karmic belief in the eco-action movie (his website prefers the term “environmental epic”). Seagal plays the same violent, stoic hero as before — “he’s the kinda guy that’ll drink a gallon of gasoline just to p*** on your campfire” — but now he was helping Indians fight off an oil company.
This film was a colossal failure but Seagal persisted with his experiment, releasing Fire Down Below, in which he played a hard-hitting environmental protection agent, and The Patriot, in which he played a doctor battling a biological virus. Instead of an action climax, The Patriot featured army helicopters dropping life-saving wild flowers on to the gasping, poisoned locals. Again the box-office result was dismal.
Demonstrating the challenge of catering to bloodthirsty adolescent males while simultaneously preaching the values of tree-hugging, the eco-action genre means a hero who brutally stomps a racist bully and then holds back from delivering the final punch to inquire: “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” It also means the bully knows the answer: “Time.”
As the new millennium began, the biggest problem for Seagal was not his compassion or even his age (he turned 50 in 2001), it was his weight. Warner Brothers came up with a way to reinvent his career, putting him in gangsta thrillers surrounded by young black actors, but the studio would only hire him on condition that he lost weight. The target was 50lb — judging by the final product, Exit Wound, 30lb was as far as he got. But being held as the most out-of-shape action star in the world offers no worries to Seagal. He is hoping, he says, “to be known as a great writer and actor someday, rather than a sex symbol”. Not in this life.
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