Low budget film? Any critically-acclaimed Canadian film you can name. For another, Narc.
Lots of people are under the misconception that you need a big budget to make action films these days. Quite the contrary. Look at Out for a Kill, for example. That was low budget, yet it had lots of action, car chases, all the elements that should have made a good action film, except for the lousy direction and truly putrid script. You don't need a big budget (especially when the star is wearing his own clothes throughout most of it) to pay attention to details, like wearing the proper clothes while engaging in an archeological dig, for example. Or having a script where every line makes one cringe at the sheer awfulness of it. If Out for a Kill had had a decent script to start with, Oblowitz might still have made a hash out of it, but not as much as he actually did.
Low budget does not automatically mean the film has to be bad, or straight to video. If one pays attention to the details, one can make quite a passable film on a fairly low budget. Unfortunately, it's lack of attention to details that is making Steven's recent films so dreadful (at worst) or mediocre (at best).
Dubbing, for instance. This is the digital age, for heaven's sake; all Steven has to do is rent a studio for an hour, record the dialogue, and have the techies digitise it and upload it to the post-production ftp site, which would take less than a day to complete. Even at a budget of $15 million, this is doable at a fairly reasonable cost. Steven can do this even if he's half a world away working on another project. If he cared.
The problem is, Steven clearly doesn't care. He's making these movies, putting in the minimum amount of effort for the maximum amount of money he can get. Once he walks off the set on the last day, that's the last of his involvement in the film. If there are necessary voiceovers, or dialogue that needs to be re-recorded, don't call him - call the vocal stand-in.
And what about his involvement in other aspects of the films he's been making? Clearly, he no longer choreographs the fight scenes, or the monkey-fu guy and all the fancy and the mostly stunt doubles fighting in Belly of the Beast would never have been done. He used to take pride in showing his expertise on screen. Now he just shows up for posing at the end of fight sequences whilst someone else does the work. Is that what we, his audience and die-hard fans pay to see - stunt doubles? No - I pay to see Steven fight, not some poxy stunt double that doesn't even come close to resembling either his physique or style.
And the music - when was the last time he was involved in the music of his films? Ticker, I think it was.
What was he paid for doing Belly of the Beast - about $3 million? I don't think he did anywheres near $3 million worth of work in that film, or in any film since Exit Wounds.
The films he's done recently are low budget and bad, and he doesn't care how bad they are as long as he gets the paycheque. And yet, those films didn't have to be as bad as they were. It's just obvious that no one, particularly Steven whose name is splashed all over the film as a selling point, gave a damn about doing the best they could with what they had.
-TD, being constructively critical
