Review: Out for a Kill

Steven Seagal plays a former professional thief turned Archaeology professor (!) who gets into a mess with some Chinese smugglers/gangsters (who are smuggling drugs through ancient artefacts). After they kill his wife (Kata Dobo) and a cute work colleague, Seagal decides to get Medieval on their arses, with help from DEA agent Michelle Goh. A (c)rapper named MC Harvey turns up in flashbacks as Seagal’s prison ‘homey’ (in a Chinese prison!). Corey Johnson plays Goh’s DEA partner.

 

I’m guessing “Marked for Justice” and “Under Deadly Ground” were already taken as suitable titles. Of the two films Steven Seagal made for directorial hack-meister Michael Oblowitz (this and “The Foreigner”, the two worst films of Seagal’s career, which has its fair share of clunkers), it’s a genuine toss-up as to which is worse, but this 2003 stinker is certainly the least coherent of the two, if maybe a little livelier. Seriously, I bet just about anyone writing a review on this film is stealing their plot synopsis from somewhere else (the DVD cover, most likely), it’s that hard to get a handle on anything.

 

Where to start? Well, the opening moments are perhaps a nice way to begin. In the opening five minutes we are taken from Bulgaria to France and finally to Connecticut, though if you ask me, France here looks an awful lot like Bulgaria. This is quite simply way too much globe-trotting too early for a film not featuring Agent 007. It’s the most narratively ADHD film I can recall having ever seen. And just why are there so many Asian people hanging around in European countries in the first place? Why couldn’t Mr. Oblowitz just make the film in Asia? Oh, right...Bulgaria is cheaper. Mr. Seagal’s character does indeed end up in China, though, and get this, he’s supposed to be an Archaeology professor. Please try and contain your laughter. He also goes to Chinatown in New York, which at least explains the presence of Asian people. Speaking of Asian people, the film paints (male) Asians in a most horrible light, not only are they seen as criminals, but they’re everywhere! It’d be a great film for racists, except if I can’t follow the story, I doubt if most racists could, either.

The funny thing is, for all its globe-trotting, the film is agonisingly slow at dishing out its actual plot. It’s lethargic, moving all over the place without actually getting anywhere. It makes me think that someone at either the writing or directing stage was horribly addicted to speed, so that the film looks all over the shop without the story itself moving along. Certainly screenwriters Danny Lerner (Seagal’s superior “Today You Die”, which oddly enough is a phrase uttered in this film) and the surely fictitiously monikered Dennis Dimster Denk could’ve used a few more writer’s workshops. The cutaway scenes to a mysterious boardroom panel are a prime example of these two hacks giving us the barest of bones and absolutely no meat. Who are these shadowy people? We never really find out, just some mysterious conspiratorial baddies who want Mr. Seagal rubbed out for no coherently explained reason. Hell, everyone in the film speaks so damn softly it’s almost impossible to work out what they’re saying in order to make these scenes, or any others (or the entire frigging plot!), comprehensible. There’s also a totally useless narration that doesn’t even help one understand the plot or characters, which might’ve been useful. And whilst I know Seagal (who also produced, and therefore shares the blame) is a Buddhist in real-life, the writers have truly drowned the film in cheesy philosophical mumbo-jumbo that never once comes off as authentic to the characters and situation.

 

It’s Mr. Oblowitz who is mostly to blame, though in making this unwatchable (Relax, I’m not accusing you of being a drug addict, just a hack filmmaker!). This is especially so when you consider he also directed “The Foreigner”, another film where the plot and character details were fatally thin. Here he seems to have this odd fascination with cutting every single scene short just to go globe-trotting somewhere else. And it’s not even just the globe-trotting. There’s one scene where Seagal is chatting to his prison buddy (Mr. Seagal must be monumentally stupid, he’s always ending up in jail, a Chinese prison this time) and...the scene slowly fades out as the prison buddy is about to tell his story. For crying out loud, Mr. Oblowitz, if you weren’t interested in the scene, why even start it at all? And boy is Mr. Oblowitz ever the pretentious hack filmmaker, never finding a scene that couldn’t be entirely ruined by a flashy edit or ten (or overexposure for absolutely no good reason!), or in one particularly awful scene, a slow-mo shot of a coffee cup spilling! Was that really necessary? He also has a quick insert of one of the boardroom guys during an unrelated car chase for absolutely no reason whatsoever. His inability to curb his tendency to over-stylise every single scene renders the film pretty much unwatchable. Along with cinematographer Mark Vargo (whose overuse of filters/gels suggests that he has no confidence in his ability to shoot things competently in their natural state. It’s a lazy ‘artistic choice’), Oblowitz has basically given us cinematic masturbation. I’ll give him credit for a couple of the fight scenes, though; Seagal’s first sword fight is not shot in the uber close-up, stuntman-happy way one usually sees in Seagal films these days. It’s quite good, even though Seagal looks awfully pudgy. Unfortunately, the next fight, a hand-to-hand battle is less effective, using lots of slow-mo and close-ups to pretty much show that Seagal ain’t what he used to be. A fight scene with a wall-climbing, Renfield-esque dude also could’ve been great, if not for the obvious use of a stunt double for Seagal and way too many close-ups once again. Then there’s another hand-to-hand battle that looks like it might be Seagal, but it’s so ridiculously sped-up that it just looks like a slapping contest. Another fight scene that finally allows sexy Goh to show her stuff is so incompetently lit by the cinematographer that you can’t see a goddamn thing. There is a terrific decapitation later on the film, though, so the film does have that. It also has one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes ever committed to film as Seagal and his prison buddy are saying their goodbyes and they do this in like five different ways, including the ‘bro’ handshake deal that always looks dorky whenever at least one of the participants is white. It plays a lot funnier than it reads, anyway.

Overall this is a truly insultingly bad film that proves what utter contempt Seagal has for his (small and dwindling, but mostly loyal) audience, and what a horrible filmmaker Oblowitz is. This is embarrassingly bad stuff no one would want to have on their résumé. 

 

Rating: F