So it's another few months, and another Seagal DTV flick. Nowadays we have to get used to Seagal having even less movement that he did 10 years ago, and he's pretty sedentary in this one. He spends most of this film sniping, but does occasionally shoot some guys and gets into one hand-to-hand fight, so I guess there's that.
Honestly, the film is just so bland and like so many of his other stuff that he's done since the turn of the century that it's hard to differentiate between the films these days. Seagal plays Robert Sikes, an ex-special forces guy who is specialised in everything and is extremely dangerous, blah blah blah. Whenever they have Seagal play these characters and they try to give background, they should just put in R Lee Emery's line from On Deadly Ground about him drinking a gallon of gas and all that.
His character is a Punisher type thing where his wife and child have been killed so now he's a vigilante on a one man mission to kill any criminal he sees. This would be alright except there's very questionable choices of killing - he decides to snipe a group of drug addicts (because it's them that's the problem, not the dealers, apparently) at a point in the movie and also kill the mayor (whose major crime is cheating on his wife), with no real explanation. Seagal's supposed to be an antagonist in this, I suppose, but that doesn't mean he can kill people for no reason.
The other main guy is a guy called William Porter, who was under Seagal in the military and knows all about him and his mission, and is out to stop him with the help of the police. He is portrayed as the polar opposite to Seagal's character - a man whose wife and son abandoned him of their own merit because of his life of drinking, cheating, and crime but is now out to "atone for his sins" by stopping Seagal. Fairly generic, like everyone else in the film.
A lot of humour in this comes from the atrocious CGI. It has to be seen to be believed, with the blood in the film being the main culprit. The acting is pretty much universally terrible also.
So with all that said, it's one to avoid...unless. Unless the theory I developed is correct.
You see, near the end of the film the police guy believes that Sikes and Porter are in fact the same person, and that Porter is using the Sikes name to cover up his actions. This leads to a final encounter where the police kill Seagal as Sikes, but they believed they killed both Sikes and Porter as it was an alter ego. In fact, Porter had ran away never to be seen again. Of course, the fatal flaw in this is that when they take a look at the body they're gonna see a big fat old guy, not Porter. Then, when sitting on the toilet after watching this, I suddenly came to a realisation...
They could be right. Sikes could be Porter, and vice versa. It is a split personality disorder sort of thing - Sikes and Porter are these two polar opposites, ying and yang. Sikes and Porter are never actually seen together by any of the major characters. In the one scene when they're in a club together, Sikes said that Porter had a bomb under his seat which would explode if he got out, allowing Sikes to walk away unscathed. Turns out the bomb was just a ruse. Before he is killed, Seagal/Sikes jumps through a window and lands on a spike, putting a bloody hole through his hand. Porter gets shot in his hand earlier in the film - an injury that is exactly the same. There is a scene where it switches between Sikes and Porter sitting in the same position in a motel room that looks exactly the same. There's plenty more hints to this idea in the film which I won't go into, but if it is actually the case that they are the same person, it makes it a LOT more interesting. Just a thought.
Honestly, the film is just so bland and like so many of his other stuff that he's done since the turn of the century that it's hard to differentiate between the films these days. Seagal plays Robert Sikes, an ex-special forces guy who is specialised in everything and is extremely dangerous, blah blah blah. Whenever they have Seagal play these characters and they try to give background, they should just put in R Lee Emery's line from On Deadly Ground about him drinking a gallon of gas and all that.
His character is a Punisher type thing where his wife and child have been killed so now he's a vigilante on a one man mission to kill any criminal he sees. This would be alright except there's very questionable choices of killing - he decides to snipe a group of drug addicts (because it's them that's the problem, not the dealers, apparently) at a point in the movie and also kill the mayor (whose major crime is cheating on his wife), with no real explanation. Seagal's supposed to be an antagonist in this, I suppose, but that doesn't mean he can kill people for no reason.
The other main guy is a guy called William Porter, who was under Seagal in the military and knows all about him and his mission, and is out to stop him with the help of the police. He is portrayed as the polar opposite to Seagal's character - a man whose wife and son abandoned him of their own merit because of his life of drinking, cheating, and crime but is now out to "atone for his sins" by stopping Seagal. Fairly generic, like everyone else in the film.
A lot of humour in this comes from the atrocious CGI. It has to be seen to be believed, with the blood in the film being the main culprit. The acting is pretty much universally terrible also.
So with all that said, it's one to avoid...unless. Unless the theory I developed is correct.
You see, near the end of the film the police guy believes that Sikes and Porter are in fact the same person, and that Porter is using the Sikes name to cover up his actions. This leads to a final encounter where the police kill Seagal as Sikes, but they believed they killed both Sikes and Porter as it was an alter ego. In fact, Porter had ran away never to be seen again. Of course, the fatal flaw in this is that when they take a look at the body they're gonna see a big fat old guy, not Porter. Then, when sitting on the toilet after watching this, I suddenly came to a realisation...
They could be right. Sikes could be Porter, and vice versa. It is a split personality disorder sort of thing - Sikes and Porter are these two polar opposites, ying and yang. Sikes and Porter are never actually seen together by any of the major characters. In the one scene when they're in a club together, Sikes said that Porter had a bomb under his seat which would explode if he got out, allowing Sikes to walk away unscathed. Turns out the bomb was just a ruse. Before he is killed, Seagal/Sikes jumps through a window and lands on a spike, putting a bloody hole through his hand. Porter gets shot in his hand earlier in the film - an injury that is exactly the same. There is a scene where it switches between Sikes and Porter sitting in the same position in a motel room that looks exactly the same. There's plenty more hints to this idea in the film which I won't go into, but if it is actually the case that they are the same person, it makes it a LOT more interesting. Just a thought.