Well, I've seen the film.
(Pause for a moment while TD puts on her reviewer's hat)
Well.
There are so many things wrong with this film, I don't know where to begin. And yet, there are a few things I did like, but because so much of it is just plain wrong, anything that I liked was overshadowed into oblivion by the rest of it.
Let us make no mistake, folks; this is not an action movie. This is an art film; almost film noir. Steven Seagal being in this film is either an accident of circumstance, or an act of desperation. A sock puppet could have taken the role of Robert Burns and not made any appreciable difference to the result (except, of course, we'd miss the five minutes Steven was actually doing his own fighting).
Am I being too harsh? Maybe. I know I was bored to tears within 15 minutes of the start. And yet, there is plenty of eye candy to satisfy most visually oriented people (like me) who like to look as well as to listen. The problem was, there was nothing to listen to.
One of the things I've always enjoyed about Steven's films is that the film is usually about something more than one man's quest to put wrong things right. His earlier films always had the story behind the story, and we eventually find out that story through the characters Steven plays. In Above the Law, Nico takes on not just people who are wrong but a whole organisation that has set itself up as being unanswerable to any authority but its own. In Out For Justice, Gino has to sift through complex relationships both past and present in order to find the man that murdered his best friend. On Deadly Ground, as awful as it was, had at its heart a very serious message for those who actively destroy the environment.
What does Out for a Kill have?
We are given a clue at the beginning of the film, a quote from Sun Tzu's Art of War, which is tells us what we're supposed to look for in the film (insert sound effect - heavy pounding on blockheads who won't get it) - "All warfare is based on the art of deception."
The only deception being practiced in the film is the one being perpetrated on the audience and Steven Seagal's fans.
Let's start with the script. Or rather, the lack of script. There are some so-called writers who should be kept out of reach of any keyboard with QWERTY on it. The dialogue - well, one can't call it dialogue because that would mean two people would actually be talking *to* each other, not *at* the audience - was banal beyond belief, and so riddled with cliches and pseudo quotes that my fingers were itching to pick up my editorial blue pencil and do something about it - too late, now, alas, with the film already made. It's a pretty sad statement about a movie where the best line in the film is "Tattoo this, bitch!" and it occurs in a scene that has practically nothing to do with the story, but is only a nice aside (presumably, so that this line could be said).
What we learn about Robert Burns is given to us in one horking great chunk of exposition (TM) by an outside party about whom we couldn't care less. Worse, though, is the fact that Robert Burns, the protagonist, the so-called "hero" of this piece, is someone we couldn't care less about either. Why? Because Burns, from start to finish, is a complete cipher.
We only know about him from what other characters have found out (strange that the Chinese cartel could find out about his past, but Tommy couldn't). We find nothing about the character of Burns from Burns himself (except that he can spout cliches really, really well). He doesn't care; Steven playing Burns doesn't care; so we don't care, either.
The villains of the piece, the Chinese drug cartel, are just plain comic-book silly. There is no threat there; the ease with which Burns dispatches each member of the cartel gets dull very quickly. The other villains of the piece - the DEA - act more like a Greek chorus than agents of international law enforcement. They are just as silly and just as ineffectual as the Chinese cartel as potential antagonists to Burns.
I imagine that Oblowitz woke up the morning he was to begin shooting OFAK and decided he was going to make an art film; and then his assistant reminded him that because Steven Seagal was in it, it also had to be an action film with Bad Guys. Strangely enough, the bits of the film that fall into the category of "art/film noir" work quite well, even though Oblowitz still needs to work on timing (for example, the shooting scene at the beginning of the film went on at least 30 seconds longer than it needed to, for the effect it was supposed to achieve). I wondered if Oblowitz had watched Blade Runner the night before he began shooting (this isn't necessarily a bad thing, you understand - but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Blade Runner has been mightily insulted). The short-cut scenes, some truncated abruptly by bad editing, simply didn't work in the film's favour because there were too many of them.
And now I come to Steven's performance. Elsewhere, folks have commented on his "sleepwalking" through the beginning of the movie. It isn't so much "sleepwalking" as it is a complete and total disinterest to the point of being comatose. Some might say Steven's range of emotional display is limited at the best of times, but he has done it, and we know he can do it, so why didn't he do it here? It seemed to me that all he did was show up on the set, run his lines (as limited as they were), and leave. It could be he was aware of how awful the script was and therefore did his bit and was gone before he could embarrass himself any further; but it seemed to me he just didn't care, about any of it.
Come on: digging at an archeological site wearing a leather coat, and a shirt and a tie? Eating dinner in the restaurant with his wife, she barely dressed in a sexy black dress, him again in his leather coat and ready to face a snowstorm - inside the restaurant? Those members of the Chinese cartel meeting around the table when all of them were based in cities around the world? They must each own a Concorde to be able to get around so fast.
It's attention to these kinds of small details that made Steven's earlier movies *feel* like they were real-life. It's the failure to attend to these details in this film that turned it from mediocre to awful.
I have said on other occasions that I was fairly certain that it wasn't Steven's weight as much as it was his being self-conscious about it that was preventing him from doing his own fighting. This film proves it, up to a point. True, in many places we think we're watching him but all we see are hands that could belong to anybody and on more than just a few occasions clearly do belong to his stunt double. But where we do see *him* fighting (I do wish they'd stop the slo-mo, though - part of the fun in watching Steven fight is his speed in real time) confirms he's still got the moves, and he's as much of a m-f bad-a** as ever he was. The monkey-fu guy spoiled that fight scene - the only part that was any good was the beginning, where Steven is sitting down (interesting how he went into his "stance" even with butt firmly planted in chair).
I won't discuss the technical and post-production problems and crummy special effects since others have mentioned it in detail elsewhere. I will say that cutting short the Luminosity Films logo at the very beginning of the film was a clear indication that at best the editing was going to be pretty bad. And it was. Awful.
I don't necessarily object to Steven doing films that are not "Steven Seagal" films. If moving into doing more art type films is the direction he wants to go in, more power to him. Only, please, let us encourage him to get a decent script and a good director who knows what he's doing, and knows how to direct Steven. And don't perpetrate any more films like this piece of rubbish on us. Please.
2/5 (only because I liked the sword fight)
-TD, disappointed that she was right (that the trailer was too good and that OFAK wouldn't live up to it)