Review: Submerged


Set in Uruguay (really Bulgaria), this lame actioner concerns scientist (more like rip-off merchant hypnotist) Nick Brimble’s scheme of brainwashing soldiers for his terrorist purposes. I’m a bit fuzzy on the details but I’d wager world domination plays a part. It’s up to ex-Special Forces guy Steven Seagal (who has been incarcerated but now released) and his also incarcerated special ops buddies (boofhead Vinnie Jones, crusty old P.H. Moriarty and foxy Alison King to foil the plan and rescue the hostages (which include a shockingly bad Gary Daniels). How about the title then? Well, the crew end up stuck in a submarine during the rescue, with zombified soldiers lurching around trying to kill them. William Hope is Agent Fletcher, instantly antagonistic towards Seagal, and this film’s resident a-hole ‘suit’.



2005 Anthony Hickox (yeah, the “Waxwork” guy) action flick is somewhere in between Seagal’s better direct-to-DVD films and the most awful films of his entire career (“Out For a Kill”, “On Deadly Ground”, “The Foreigner”, “Ticker”, “Attack Force”), but nowhere near the best (“Hard to Kill”, “Under Siege”). It’s somewhat watchable, I suppose.



At least the cast is interesting; Hope makes for a fine sleaze (he was Gorman in “Aliens”), Brit vets Moriarty and Brimble are always nice to see, King has a sexy Rhona Mitra-meets-Lara Croft quality to her, and former soccer hard man Vinnie Jones plain walks off with the whole film, in a very enjoyable, over-the-top performance. Seagal is as somnambulant as he always seems these days (and some of his dialogue has been looped by a bad impersonator), and D-grade action star Gary Daniels is gob-smackingly awful in a small part.



The plot is kinda stupid (“24” meets “Night of the Living Dead” meets the first half of “Predator”), but oddly enough it is the surprisingly lame direction by Hickox which I found most disappointing. He adopts the same irritating flash-cut, overly-stylised tricks that are more akin to the two Michael Oblowitz helmed Seagal stinkers “The Foreigner” and “Out For a Kill”. But unlike Oblowitz, at least Hickox doesn’t make the plot incoherent. Scripted by Hickox and Paul de Souza, die-hard Seagal fans need only apply, but he’s made far, far worse.



Rating: C

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