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INTO THE SUN (2005)
Sample dialogue: "You have woken a sleeping giant!" Steven Seagal's still making movies, did you know that? Last time I saw a Seagal movie in theatres, the action scenes consisted of footage that was actually sped up to make it look like he was moving faster than he was. On this path he has inexorably continued, regularly satiating a direct-to-video demand in...somewhere. Somebody's gotta still be seeing these movies, and he makes like three a year. Now, Seagal movies in a nutshell, from what I recall: they usually open with some totally superfluous bit of heroism from Seagal, and then all the good guys kiss his ass for the rest of the movie, and some woman throws herself at him, and the villains all die without landing so much as a punch on him. If he sustains any injuries at all, it's because he has somehow been captured (surely, through unfair means) and tortured (which he resists mightily). Into The Sun gives us a more vulnerable, fallible Seagal. There are two fight scenes where his opponents actually land a blow (one each), and at one point he's actually wrong about something. ("He'll be fine" he says, though the person he's talking about is already dead) There's even a scene where somebody "gets the jump" on him (by hiding a gun in, apparently, her hair). I don't believe we've ever seen a Seagal so perilously close to defeat. It still starts with him rescuing a damsel in distress from thugs, which scuttles whatever covert-ops operation he and his black partner (so, so dead) are involved in. You think that guy's dead? How about when he proposes to his girl halfway through the movie, and promises her that as soon as this one last job's taken care of, he's out and can start his life with her? How dead is THAT? Anyway, somehow he ends up fighting the Yakuza (obligatory scene where some guy who screwed up cuts off his own finger and has his apology rejected anyway), who are less an organized crime syndicate and more a cult of self-mutilating worshippers of the Japanese god of war (no kidding). Early on, Seagal seems as unstoppable as ever - even in this post-9/11 world, befuddled Marines only say "Sir?" when he walks without pause through a blaring metal detector into CIA headquarters. Steven Seagal doesn't have to obey our rules, man...he's Steven Seagal! He enlists some allies - aside from the bumbling sidekick whose job is to say things like "Think they have hamburgers here?" until his third-act death, an ally of Seagal in a movie basically means anybody who totally sucks up to him, with lines as innocuous as "I'm always happy to see you" (hot chick) and "I will assist you in any way possible" on up to classics of obsequiousness "You look younger and taller!" and "I would pay twice this amount for instruction from you." You know a villain in a Seagal movie because they're the ones who are smoking, playing video games, and otherwise wasting their time, health and energy while they should be tonsils-deep on his cock. It's almost a half hour before we see Seagal beat anybody up, and 35 minutes later until it happens again (for all of fifteen seconds). Not that we're missing much when those fight scenes actually happen. The footage isn't sped up, but it's all shot so close up that it's hard to tell just what's going on. Isn't a big part of the appeal of martial arts movies that we can marvel at the superlative gymnastic skill of what we're seeing? Here, we basically see Seagal's hands flailing past the camera, and his opponent's hands flailing past the camera, and I think I saw a guy get kicked in the shin. Seagal kills one guy with chopsticks, that was pretty cool. The one bit of freshness in Into The Sun would be the nifty computer graphics added to shots of Tokyo near the beginning of the film, which could have been used to make clear the layouts of that most labyrinthine metropolis in a better movie (maybe one that didn't give its locations names like "Tokyo Suburb"). So, yeah...worse than ever, and my curiosity is more than slaked. Unlike what the cover would suggest, Seagal never uses a giant machine gun and there are no explosions. It's almost impossible to remember what made Seagal seem like such a fresh new action star around 1988 or so. So, uh...what are Van Damme's movies like these days? (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE I's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |