Review: Mercenary for Justice


Mercenary Steven Seagal has just returned from a botched mission that saw his buddy killed (thanks mostly to Luke Goss, the spook who set him up), when he is coerced by his shady boss (uber-oily Roger Guenveur Smith) to help bust out from prison the son of an infamous gun runner. That’s not even the half of it, but it’s just about the only part of the story I could easily follow. Jacqueline Lord plays a sexy member of Seagal’s posse-for-hire.



Tolerable 2005 Don E. FauntLeRoy vehicle for now direct-to-DVD mainstay Seagal is slightly lesser than say “Into the Sun”, “Ruslan”, and even the director’s “Today You Die”. There seems to be a genuine attempt at something credible here, unlike many of Seagal’s latter day efforts (“The Foreigner” and “Out for a Kill” immediately spring to mind), but it doesn’t make a lick of sense, either. I mean, I can’t even tell you who or what Seagal’s character was supposed to be, really, let alone everyone else in the film, and there’s enough story ideas here for at least three films, that surely would’ve been more coherent than the one film we get here.



The bizarro bad guy turn by Roger Guenveur Smith (as Seagal’s boss) sure is something, though…not sure what that ‘something’ is, but something is better than nothing. Incoherent or not, it’s really kinda watchable, even while you struggle to make heads or tails of what it is you are watching. This isn’t good, but the glory days of “Hard to Kill” are way over as it is. It could always be worse. The impenetrable screenplay is by Steven Collins, who wrote the slightly more coherent Seagal vehicle “Shadow Man”, released the same year.



Rating: C

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