Yes, you read that right. This June I had the crazy idea to commit to watching a Steven Seagal movie every day. While stumbling around on sites like Tubi, Vudu, Amazon Prime and my own private collection, I discovered that Steven Seagal is still making movies. In fact, he has been making a shitload of films. (Netflix didn’t have shit!)
Growing up in the 80s provided us kids with a phenomenal amount of direct to video films with action stars that today would never make a movie. Guys like Kurt Thomas who starred in Gymkata or Sho Kosugi in the ninja trilogy that started off with Enter the Ninja in 1981. Sure, we all know the classics from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, but we also had Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Nick Nolte and even Burt Reynolds still blowing a ridiculous amount of shit up on the big screen and at every video store around the country.
I remember seeing The Perfect Weapon on cable when it came out in the early 90s and saying to myself, “Now who the fuck is this guy?” And that was the exact reaction I had when I saw Steven Seagal in his breakout film Above the Law when it was released in 1988. Not only was the movie Seagal’s first real role, but it was also a starring role.
Above the Law was amazing. Here is this Italian American bad ass saying all kinds of slang I heard my relatives use growing up in a raw dog action film that co-starred the queen of kick ass Pam Grier and the constant bad guy Henry Silva. It also had Sharon Stone who was relatively unknown outside of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol and a few others.
He was not what you would expect your typical action star to be. He was balding, he ran hilarious, and he was skinny. This was no guy sized up like Schwarzenegger or Ferrigno, this could be my Uncle Vinny who knew this style called Aikido that I had only read about in the back of a few comic books as a kid.
And back-to-back he made some killer films, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, and my favorite Out for Justice. I continued watching Seagal into the mid-90s with the Under Siege films, which are still excellent as well, but at some point, I drifted off. I caught a few others through the years such as Exit Wounds, Urban Justice and On Deadly Ground, but eventually Seagal fell off my radar.
That brings us to my journey and this silly idea to embark on something I called The Summer of Seagal. In May I searched out as many Seagal films I could find streaming and set myself on a scheduled journey to see what Seagal has been up to. And let me tell you, he’s been up to some off the wall shenanigans. All weird Russia connections, weird inappropriate sexual advances towards colleagues, and beefing with other actors aside, I went in unbiased and with an open Zen like mind!
For starters, Seagal does not have a receding hairline anymore. That magically stopped by the time he did Hard to Kill anyway, but it has gotten thicker and thicker. For the most part he always wears his jet black hair slicked back and when it’s long in a pony tail, but in one movie it was a straight up mullet. I couldn’t stop starring at the mullet cause it was in the 2000’s and seemed absurd to me.
Seagal’s evolution has taken on many different ethnic characters. I have been calling him for years The Chameleon cause from the movies I watched through the years he has gone from a Italian street guy all the way to a Blues man. You will notice in some films he talks like BB King, in others like Carlito Brigante! He goes from Boys in the Hood with South Central LA lingo to Don Corleone with this strange whispering that I had to constantly turn the television up to hear. Which by the way, that is very annoying! Especially when you have the tv cranked in volume to hear whatever dumb line he is saying and them someone crashes into a table and it gets crazy loud. Stop whispering bro.
It’s hard to explain but Seagal talking with these regional dialects is not like Gary Oldman using a different accent in different movies, it’s like Steven Seagal almost making fun of other nationalities. Mind you, I know that’s not his intention by any means, he just seems weird trying to be a Creole guy or a Native American.
Picture Keanu Reeves doing a buddy cop movie with Keenan Ivory Wayans and tell me if it sounds like a movie you would green light if you owned a film studio. Well, someone did that with Seagal and Wayans – The Glimmer Man is the result.
I cannot put all the weight on him though for bad accents. Seagal’s co-star Dennis Hopper in Ticker has the worst Irish accent as well. We all know how great of an actor Hopper was, but sometimes you just can’t hit the ball out of the park.
Regarding the plots to the majority of these films, Seagal is usually an ex-CIA or retired Special Ops guy. I saw him recover a stealth bomber in Flight of Fury that turns invisible. I’m totally not kidding; the motherfucking jet turns invisible. A guy he previously trained steals it, sells it to Middle Eastern terrorist that looked more a guy that owned a jewelry store in Beverly Hills and he is flying around like he is in Top Gun. He fights weird vampires with a sword in Against the Dark, stops a deadly virus in The Patriot and saves the world from aliens in Attack Force.
Most of which is done by a stunt man and it’s obvious Seagal has pretty much thrown in the towel. I progressively notice that as Seagal gets older and older in these films, he spends more time sitting than taking part of the action. Sure, he steps to the opponents, but then some guy with shoe polish hair comes in and kicks a few of these villains out windows and shit. That is in reference to the opening scene in Kill Switch where they literally show the same guy fly out the window on repeat from different angles. Ten times to be exact.
Seagal also has lots of hip hop stars in his films. I saw films with Ja Rule, Kurrpt, Nas, Ice-T, and two with the late DMX. I caught DMX’s mug shot in the background on a wall in a Bucharest police station in A Good Man which I thought was great. The whole marketing to an urban audience but have really worked well though because I also watched the first season of his reality show Law Man and so many African American people in New Orleans were recognizing him working the beat over and over. Even with all his fame I’d bet Kurt Russell would go unnoticed in the community!
I can go on and on about how in multiple movies he has love scenes with woman who take off their clothing and he sists there in his finest Wilson’s Leather Trench coats and how chubby he looks in his Asian outfits. We all get old, some of us beef up. It happens. But when you watch 31 movies from the same guy in a month, you really see an evolution of extreme measures.
Out of all the movies I watched that I had not previously seen, I would say my two favorite ones that made me laugh a lot were Code of Honor, A Good Man and Absolution. I discovered that A Good Man, Absolution and Force of Execution and all connected by Seagal playing the same character Alexander. But you would never know because the titles are all different and who else is paying that much attention.
The best way I can describe my experience with The Summer of Seagal is to refer to what me and my buddies would do when we all went to the bars every weekend back in our single days. We would pick some liquor that no one drank and it would be our drink for the year. One year for example we picked Goldschlager. In January it started out a little tough to bang out a shot. By May we were on easy street stepping it up and maybe drinking two or three shots to prove how much balls we really had. But by New Year’s Eve we couldn’t wit for that ball to drop so we didn’t have to drink Goldschlager again. Enough was enough.
Did I enjoy this experience, you bet! Regardless of some poor acting, way to intricate plots with more complicated sub plots, silly stand in stunt men, Seagal’s Entenmann’s Chocolate glazed donut dyed goatee and a slew of other co stars you could care less about, I enjoyed this. Next time I might spread out Seagal over a little more time.
Here is my entire Seagal list in no particular order: Out for Justice, Under Siege, Under Siege 2 Dark Territory, Above the Law, Absolution, Ticker, Into the Sun, General Commander, Flight of Fury, Gutshot Straight, Sniper Special Ops, Asian Connection, A Dangerous Man, A Good Man, The Patriot, Kill Switch, The Foreigner, Maximum Conviction, Hard to Kill, The Glimmer Man, Mercenary for Justice, Marked for Death, Exit Wounds, Executive Decision, Half Past Dead, On Deadly Ground, The Perfect Weapon, Attack Force, Beyond the Law, Machete and Code of Honor. As a bonus I watched the first season of law man, but I couldn’t get to Season Two.
What have I learned…? If you can get funding, you can get any movie made direct to video. I saw some seriously bad movies and I saw a few that showed Seagal as a main star, but he was barley in them and I got stuck watching some other dopey guy I never heard of carry the movie.
In the meantime, if you do decide to watch one Steven Seagal movie, I suggest Out for Justice. It’s awesome. In tribute to the classic film when Steven Seagal was still Italian in his movies, we decide to create a limited shirt with the greatest line from Seagals career he says over and over throughout the film.
To order the new greatest shirt in your summer collection click here for your SUMMER OF SEAGAL ANYBODY SEEN RICHIE shirt!
It’s available now in the webstore!
