It’s easy to laugh at him now, after Will Sasso and a steady diet of cheeseburgers n’ ice cream (presumably) have turned him into a joke, but Steven Seagal, at the beginning of his career, was a pretty awesome action star. He also had a nice little career for someone whose entire film stardom was built on a bet between studio moguls, Trading Places-style, that one executive could turn an average martial-arts instructor into a star.
And so, without further ado, let’s cut through the direct-to-DVD crap of his later career and examine the best films of the one, the only, Steven Seagal.
Mainly because of his ridiculously awesome death–getting blasted out of a mid-air transfer hatch while a stealth fighter flies underneath a hijacked airliner. Seagal. in what amounts to little more than a cameo, somehow gets second billing under Kurt Russell (a CIA analyst who manages to survive sneaking on the plane). It’s a good enough airborne thriller, not groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but passable enough, and Halle Berry provides some awesome eye candy as a stewardess.
Pretty much the same plot as Above the Law, except set in New York–Seagal is an NYPD cop facing off against a murderin’, drug-dealin’ psycho and his team of fellow muderin’, drug-dealin’ psychos. No big conspiracy here, but an excellent supporting cast–look for Gina Gershon, Dominic Chianese, Jerry Orbach and Julianna Margulies (hey, that’s 1/2 of NBC’s nineties primetime lineup) in small roles. A solid, well-made actioner.
3. Hard to Kill
This gets up here for the immortal, off-quoted line: “I’ll take you to the bank, senator. The blood bank.”
Awesome. Seagal is a cop, buried in a coma for years, who wakes up and begins to avenge his shooting with the assistiance of his beautiful nurse (Kelly LeBrock, who he later married). Some awful dialogue, but Seagal is his normal, bad-guy-killin’ self in it. A good film.
Seagal’s whole career was built on a bet–one Hollywood exec bet another that he could turn a nondescript stuntman (Seagal, of course) into a movie star. Well, it worked, starting with this excellent eighties action flick helmed by future The Fugitive and Under Siege director Andrew Davis. Employing some fine Chicago locations, Seagal stars as Nico Toscani, a windy city Narc who uncovers a drug-smuggling ring with some murky ties to Toscani’s Vietnam-era CIA service. It’s amazing how fast and brutal Seagal was as a young action star, looking like a combination of Bruce Lee and Commando-era Schwarzenegger. Strangely enough, this movie also has a ton of young, rising stars in the background–look for a real young Sharon Stone as his wife.
1. Under Siege
His best movie, by a huge, huge margin, but it’s not really due to Seagal’s performance. No, here the credit goes to Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey as the pair of main heavies–Jones as a psychotic ex-CIA agent who spearheads the hijacking of the USS Missouri battleship, and Busey as the ship’s turncoat XO. Both are wonderfully evil and hilarious, massacring sailors in one scene and doing a faux-crazy routine with Pentagon brass in the next. Seagal is also in fine form as the Missouri’s cook and ex-SEAL commando who teams up with a stranded Playboy playmate (yeah, really) to take back the Missouri. The villains are delightful, and the competent Davis direction cuts through the absurdity of the plot. One of the nineties’ finest action films (avoid the awful sequel, BTW).
