Submerged - review

Conley

New Member
TDWoj said:
MOST of the movie is dubbed?

Steven, WHEN are you going to get your act together and actually be IN the movies you're supposed to be in? This is getting past endurance, it really is.

-TD, deciding now to save her money for something else

No one besides for Seagal appeared to have any big dialogue problems.

I'll likely be speaking to Anthony Hickox next week, so hopefully he'll clear things up.
 

TDWoj

Administrator
Staff member
Well, judging from the photographs from Bulgaria, I'd say he spent more time off the set than on. We've pretty much come to the conclusion that he just isn't interested - or isn't being paid enough, or isn't contractually obligated - to do post-production work.
 

Lollipop

Banned
He sure is taking a beating on this thread! For a minute thought I had click to another site! Doesn't sound like fan site, more like bashing!

I have seen several of his movies a few I have missed, Ticker, The Patriot and a couple of others! No some of them are not that good! But I just skip on by! Then watch the next!

Wonder why he will never stop in and at least comment on the site, maybe he has dropped by and got the same feeling I did! Thought he was in the wrong place!
 

GlimmerMan

Huge Member
Lollipop - although this is a fan site, you need to be realistic. He will probably never stop by and comment on this site because he is probably too 'busy' filming his latest low budget movie in some cheap Eastern European country and rubbing his hands together as he thinks of all the dollars which will be soon dropping into his bank account as we go out and spend our hard earned money on his latest turgid reckoning.

I have been an avid fan of Seagal's since 1990. I was one of the first to defend him when attacks were made by time-wasting a$$holes on the old site - but the fact remains that I, like a lot of people, am disappointed with the latest slew of movies, which he is churning out at a rate that is nearly twice as fast as his old ones. Pretty much the last eight movies he has made have been well below the usual high standard and I am rather disillusioned about this. There is nothing insidious going on - we are just voicing an opinion which we have a right to do.

With respect.

Glimmerman
 
I have only one thing to add. There are many other bad movies even from The Ticker or Out for a Kill (I like this movie). Just watch movies of Gary Daniels , Don "The Dragon" Wilson or even latest Dennis Hopper titles. I know we are talking about Seagal here. But I like him, his movies. Even If he is now like he Is. We just have to accept it or throw it away. I'am happy that even in that age he is making so many action movies..
 

ad_adrian

Twitter: adadrian
very true glimmer man.....we might be fans diehard fans if that but even we can tell when he's not up to his best and we cant be happy with everything he does! thats just stupid you have to be realistic and lately he has/is going down....he has to do something soon or it will be 2 late
 

suziwong

Administrator
Staff member
slawek_wozniak said:
...one more thing. What do you mean the Steven voice is dubbed in whole movie

it means another actor is talking on the movie instead of Steven Seagal.

suzi
 

suziwong

Administrator
Staff member
slawek_wozniak said:
:) I know that. But Is that true....that in Submerged Steven only moves his lips...

hihihihihi :D !! yes I guess.. may be in some scenes.. I didn't see yet.

suzie
 

TwoCents

New Member
I can cope with the action not being as good as his prime, I can cope with lower budgets and even flimsy plots but the voice dubbing is something I can't, I watched Out Of Reach for the first time the other day and although people had said about the dubbing I didn't know it was both the voiceover (narration on reading the letters) but also in a lot of scenes as well also the other actors didn't seemeed to be dubbed when they were in the same scene so whats the reason I just don't get it? I openly laughed quite a few times which concidering the subject matter is terrible, I will never watch it again and now hearing Submerged is dubbed in parts I'm very dissapointed. I have been a fan since the late 80's, then through high school I didn't see many movies so wasn't really what I could call a fan but around the mid 90's I was a fan again and since but if it keeps getting this bad I'm afraid I will skip the new ones and just stick to his classics :(
 

Lollipop

Banned
GlimmerMan said:
Lollipop - there was no need to remove your post - I wasn't offended by it.

GMan

I removed it because we should allow all to dog him without debating it!
Everyone has a different way of looking at things! We all just don't see things the same! And with this many people we are not! So just let everyone express how they feel where they feel!
And keep the peace! :apeace:
But opinion of other's are not consider the gospel! :D
 

DiDa

Super Moderator
Staff member
Another question: does anyone knows how Seagal looks in Submerged. Did he lose some weight?
 

SimonLustenberger

Well-Known Member
Hello Folks!

I found this review on: http://www.yourvideostoreshelf.com/reviews/Submerged.html

Well, I never thought I’d hear the words “Cocksucker mother****er” come out of Steven Seagal’s mouth so passionately.

And when that’s my opening sentence, you know you’re in for a bad Seagal flick.

Submerged has had quite the interesting ride from conception to distribution. While I’ll have to wait for the director to return from Europe to hopefully get his comments on the production, Submerged has seemingly been marketed as ten different things during its lifespan. There was a point when this was its synopsis: “A submarine crew is trapped at the bottom of the ocean after cases of a biological agent are broken. The crew must fight against the mutated creatures that are attacking them, a U.S. Destroyer that has turned against them, and traitors from within.”

The Submerged that we’re getting is entirely different from that. Fifteen minutes of the movie is spent on a submarine. There is no unintentional sinking, biological agents, mutated creatures, an evil U.S. destroyer, or even traitors. So essentially, they changed the entire plot after selling the film to foreign investors. The change seems to have been brought on by someone at Millennium Films loving the idea behind The Manchurian Candidate. The similarities are just too large to gloss over.

Seagal, who just looks tired and worn out with giant wrinkles becoming more and more obvious as each movie comes and goes, plays Chris Cody, an imprisoned soldier who broke some of those pesky international laws in order to prevent a terrorist attack sometime after 9/11. The government needs Cody to lead his old team into the usual unnamed foreign country that Bulgaria doubles for. In addition to taking out a man with terrorist ties, they also must bring back five terrorists to U.S. soil. If this is achieved, a fat paycheck and a nice pardon is in all of their futures. They enter the area successfully, securing what Cody and his crew have been led to believe are terrorists.

Only that’s not the truth. These men are American soldiers, brainwashed via a new mind control technique that creates nearly unstoppable killing machines. There’s a huge conspiracy plot that comes along with it, one that is just too big for a Seagal flick. From the moment their submarine explodes to the last five minutes, Submerged is just trash.

Anthony Hickox, a long time b-movie director, is at the helm of this one and his experience shows. While he is overambitious at times, he and his cinematographer did a fantastic job during much of the movie, especially the battle scenes. Since this is a Seagal vehicle, meaning that international distributors won’t be so quick to balk at blood, he also keeps the red stuff flowing. Some of the deaths that Hickox and Souza dreamt up are quite brutal to watch.

The most incredibly ridiculous aspect of the movie is no doubt the dubbing of Steven Seagal’s voice. Certain direct-to-video Seagal films in the past have done this sparingly, using another actor’s voice over Seagal’s lips. This habit, however, is done throughout the entire movie. And when Seagal kicks a certain someone through a huge window towards the film’s end, if you look even casually at the blurred background you’ll notice that there’s no way in hell that its Steven Seagal.

Most notable about this average Seagal film is that Into the Sun was released just a little over three months before Submerged’s release. That’s quite the turnaround time.

DVD: Completely barebones. Not even Sony’s usual assortment of subtitles is here, which makes me think the final product was delivered late.

Not to be confused with the epic Fred Olen Ray film of the same name, which starred Coolio.
 

Administrator

Administrator
Staff member
The Movie:

Wasn’t Submerged supposed to feature Steven Seagal fighting mutants on a submarine deep below the surface of the ocean? I seem to remember that being the general idea behind this one when it was announced awhile ago. Well, something happened (rewrites, I’d guess) and the mutants were completely taken out of the script and replaced with a mind control scientist guy, and apparently the submarine wasn’t that important because it’s only in the film for ten minutes. But hey, it’s a Steven Seagal movie, who cares as long as it’s got loads of ass kicking in it, right? Right. Sadly, post production tinkering rendered this puppy useless in that department too.

The plot, if you can call it that, involves a bad ass named Chris Cody (Seagal) who is sprung from military prison to lead a group of tough guys into a hot spot where they need to spring some American soldiers who are being held as prisoners of war. It seems that these unfortunate soldiers were trying to take down the mind control scientist guy, and they got captured by the bad guys when they were distracted by a woman and her exploding goats (seriously). Things go wrong, and they end up having to head on off to Montevideo where El Presidente is surprised by the rioting going on in the streets. I guess some higher ups in the government there have got ties to the mind control scientist guy, and Cody and his team of experts (we know they’re experts because when we first see them the screen freezes and flashes their name and their weapons specialty at us for a second or two – who needs character development?) will have to stop at nothing to make sure that they’re stopped once and for all. Along the way, they hang out in submarine for about ten minutes before it blows up and sinks just like the Titanic (watch for the sinking scene and you can’t help but notice this).

I swear to God, this movie was edited by an epileptic color blind six year old with attention deficit disorder. The colors in this movie are so over saturated (intentionally) and the editing is so rapid fire that at times I felt like the movie was going to give me a seizure. The angles change literally like once every five seconds. There are moments in the film where instead of showing the characters walking for a ten second clip, the filmmakers chose to cut three times in that same ten second time frame to give the effect that they’re time traveling or something. The end result is an ugly and a very, very, very retarded looking film. Everything is so hyperactive that the end result is almost unwatchable. There were times during the film, specifically during the action scenes, where there’s so much cutting and zipping and zapping and slow mo and speed up and what-the-Hell-were-they-thinking going on that I literally yelled at the screen in pain.

So why on Earth would anyone want to watch this film? Well, for the comedy. There are some truly hilarious moments, all of which relate to Seagal. First off, there’s the voice. He’s dubbed, and he’s dubbed very poorly for almost the entire film. Seeing Seagal at this point in his life swearing in a poorly dubbed Cajun accent is funny, I don’t care what anyone says. Then there’s the obvious hiding of Seagal’s body. It’s rare that you see him from the waist up, and when you do, more often than not it’s an obvious body double standing in for him. There are two scenes in which the guy in the long black leather coat doesn’t even look like Seagal, and these are the scenes where we see him from the waist down. Third, there’s an absolutely amazing moment towards the end of the film were Steve kicks a guy in the gut and sends him through a window and then about two hundred feet through the air. Did someone give Seagal (or, more accurately, his stunt double) bionic legs? Maybe if he had bionic legs, this would be possible, but the film doesn’t mention bionic legs at all, only mind control powers.

The film has some other notables involved in it, that adds to the weirdness. The director is Anthony Hickox, the man responsible for Waxwork and Hellraiser III (better known as ‘the one with the CD face Cenobite), and Gary Daniels who starred opposite Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson in Ring Of Fire and Bloodfist IV shows up here too. William Hope of Hellraiser II (this movie has strange Hellraiser ties) and XXX has a small role, as does Vinnie Jones of Snatch. None of these people are able to stop the film from sucking like a chest wound, but they are there and I’d feel bad if I didn’t mention it.
The DVD

Video:

The 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen does provide a nice reproduction of a crappy looking film. With the colors pumped up as high as they are in this film and with the continues cutting and what not it’s hard to really give an accurate grade to the overall picture as the quality of each shot tends to be all over the place, but for the most part, if I had to guess, I’d say that this DVD probably does a pretty accurate job of reproducing the look of the film the way that the filmmakers intended. There aren’t any mpeg compression issues, edge enhancement is minimal, and the black levels and shadows (which play in important part in hiding Seagal’s aging physique) are strong and don’t break up at all.

Sound:

The Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track is fine. It’s not the best I’ve ever heard, but it does bring Seagal’s bad Cajun accent to life and the dialogue is clean and clear and easy to understand over top of the sound effects and ever so emotive score. There are a few scenes that do make nice use of the rear surround channels, notably a couple of the explosions and shoot outs in the film, where debris and bullets zip past you, which adds a little bit to the film – it’s still not enough to save it, but it does help a bit.

Extras:

The only extra features on this disc are a few trailers for other straight to video action movies from Columbia/Tri-Star, not that the movie really warranted anything else…

Final Thoughts:

Even the hardest of hardcore Steven Seagal fans are going to have trouble getting through this one. The filmmaker’s tried to hide the absolutely incoherent storyline by burying it in flashy post production editing and CGI silliness and all it did was make things worse. After Into The Sun I’d hoped old Stevey was on the comeback trail but this is truly bottom of the barrel stuff. It might make for a good drinking movie to watch with a group as it has quite a bit of unintentional comedy, but other than that, stay far, far, far away from Submerged. Skip it.

Movie : 0.5 out of 5
Video : 3.5 out of 5
Audio : 4 out of 5
Extras : 0.5 out of 5
Replay : 0.5 out of 5

Source : DVD Talk.

Not a good review. :(
 
Best Film Ever

Vertigo, Casablanca, Taxi Driver, Submerged within in the first ten minutes the class of all these films becomes immediately obvious. All four films feature stunning script writing, amazing directing, unbelievable acting and subtexts only rivalled by the works of Joyce. In Submerged we see two young upcoming actors add their physical, mental and artistic peaks. Steven Seagal plays one of his most memorable roles in a truly heart-warming portrayal of a man battling against all the odds. I find it difficult to even imagine Thomas Hardy creating a more believable heroic and yet somehow someway strongly familiar character. But to lavish all the attention on Mr Seagal would be a grave insult to what stands as the films shining light. Here we find Gary Daniels to make the film his own with a harrowing deep and controversial portrayal of a man driven to desperate means by his penury and abject demoralisation yet somehow we find his character, Sharpe, to be the most memorable and likeable in the piece. Perhaps it is his overt charity, compassion and a reaffirming voracious` ingenuity which makes Sharpe possibly the most popular character in film history The cinematography is reminiscent of a young Kurosawa and the directing constantly sweeps between Ridley Scott epic ness and Aranofski humanity. The directing is the first in my memory at least to name the artist in question a virtuoso in his field. If you've ever loved, if you've ever lost, if you've ever fought against the odds for something you believe in, this film will serve as your grail. And so I must depart but I will leave you with some words from the great man himself Gary Daniels "Believe it, achieve it".
This film will change your life, don’t miss out.
 

Serena

Administrator
Hi, Nice Bit of Crumpet. :) Welcome to the forum.

Well, that was some review. ;) I don't know who you are, but have you ever thought of being a press/publicity agent for Steven and/or writing the synoposis for his DVD covers? :D

Many of us haven't seen it yet, but thanks for sharing your review. Hope to see you around the forum. :)
 

Clement3000

aka The Phoenix
Hey Guys! :D Thanks for posting the reviews, doesn't sound all that promising, voice dubbing kills me, it seems to be selling good though
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #877 in DVD
 
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