Steven Seagal Movies

Just a lowly, lowly cook

Good bad films. You know these films so well you’ve probably forgotten most of the ones you’ve seen. The ones that don’t make it on to film lists, the ones that people don’t buy, since they are frequently shown on TV. But among their number can’t be counted Titanic, or Gladiator, or another project of equal merit. Nobody who watches movies sees them in this way. They normally lack most of the established standards of artistic credibility: sound plotting, good acting, realistic pacing, good cinematography, and so on.

So how can they possibly be any good? And what’s so bad about them anyway?

There are several basic features of the good bad film. All of these features have their own context, which is to say, they are judged entirely subjectively. This marks good bad films as different from films which are simply made badly from a technical point of view.

Firstly, the good bad film represents an alternative kind of beauty to the ones that we are accustomed to admiring in film. One of the precursors of the good bad film is the good bad poem, which George Orwell defined as ‘a graceful monument to the obvious.’ Kipling’s poetry supposedly belonged to this category. In Orwell’s vision the good bad poem was one of the cultural objects in which the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘ordinary’ man’s tastes coincided, and was proof that within each lay some semblance of the other. If a good bad poem can be ‘a graceful monument to the obvious’ then a good bad film can also display a kind of artless grace, and a violence that dreams of dance, a sincere foolery.

The good bad film is also funny in a way that is unforeseen by its makers. For example, Teenwolf and Ghostbusters were designed to make audiences laugh, they are intentionally funny. Whereas Kickboxer and Commando are action movies that have breezed into comedy. The viewer calls the shots in the film’s categorisation, not the filmmakers. This might be described as postmodern but such films are poorly understood from an ironic point of view, since this would make them seem clever or laudable when we know that no such intention ever existed on the part of the makers. Instead, the good bad film should be celebrated for facilitating talk, in the way that it opens conversation that will never become earnest or unfriendly.

This is not to say that they won’t cause disagreements. The chief characteristic of the idea of good bad films is that they are determined by a personal choice. No two people will ever think of exactly the same ‘good bad’ films. Most people will agree on favourites, however (favourite movies and favourite actors: nobody really looks out for the directors of these films), and just as every cinematic genre has one or two unsurpassable performers, so the actor who stands at the summit of the good bad film is Steven Seagal. For around 15 years he has been the foremost artist of the unintentionally comic film. At the same time, he has divided opinion among those who take his work seriously.

Before exploring his career as an actor it is worth dealing with one common criticism of his films, namely, that they are ‘all the same’. Most of the time this is true, but even so it only makes the total body of work stronger in its consistency. Popular culture often throws up artists who are said to have produced the same work over and over again throughout their careers: Yasujiro Ozu, Cecil Taylor, Andy Warhol, and J G Ballard are examples. It is the distinction that is gained through repetition, and the way in which artistic continuity lays bare the emptiness of the ‘new thing’ of the culture industry, which makes the collective body of their work so powerful. It also makes them harder to criticise sometimes because they appear to be so accessible. In a similar fashion, it may be said that we have a too-easy time with Seagal movies, as if their meaning has been explained in advance by all of his predecessors in action cinema, and by his own previous work. It would be useful to have a clearer idea of what is unique about Steven Seagal’s achievement.

How's the action, boys? Mind if I play?

Steven Seagal’s first seven roles up until Executive Decision (1996), were as the leading man. He was not a new kind of action hero – martial artists had punched and kicked their way to screen success at least since the days of Bruce Lee – but Seagal offered new kinds of moves on account of his Aikido training and his spiritual discipline. One of his major early roles was as Mason Storm in Hard to Kill (1990), the first of many films in which he plays a wronged man who takes time to recover from a brutal attack by his enemies before gaining an equally brutal revenge on them. In Hard to Kill Seagal appears almost invincible, setting a trend followed in almost all of his films. Even Schwarzenegger died for his (and our) sins in End of Days, but Seagal is unlikely to agree to do anything that requires him having to act a death scene. The exception that proves the rule is his strange, fleeting exit from a high-altitude vacuum chamber in Executive Decision (1996).

Hard to Kill is worth pausing at for a moment because it also introduces several other trends in Seagal movies. For a start there is the title, Hard to Kill: three solid words that tell you everything and nothing about the film’s content. It is repeated throughout his career: Above the Law (the alternative title for Nico), Marked for Death, Out for Justice, On Deadly Ground…these are the better known ones. Similarly, Seagal’s character names begin to adopt a formula of tough, no nonsense efficiency – we’re not sure where he’s going but he’s sure as hell gonna get there. In Hard to Kill he is the police detective Mason Storm; in Out for Justice he adopted the more extravagant sounding Gino Felino; in the eco-friendly On Deadly Ground he played a man named Forrest Taft; in the Under Siege movies he was the sailorly Casey Ryback. In his films made between 1996 and 1998 he adopted more down-to-earth names, perhaps as a nod in the direction of the spiritual harmony and all-round earthiness that he was trying to acquire in real life. His heroes were named Austin Travis, Jack Cole, Jack Taggart, and Wesley McLaren. In his more recent European settings he has been, sadly, Jonathan Cold.

Another trend that begins with Hard to Kill is that one or several of the other characters praise him for being ‘the finest cop I know’ or some such professional commendation. In the case of female characters, he is admired for having large muscles and genitalia. Besides these, Seagal movies also follow trends that were set by earlier, pioneering good bad films such as No Retreat, No Surrender and Kickboxer, in which the hero undergoes a period of intense training after an initial setback or humiliation, using the new powers he has gained to finally defeat his enemy. After the training period is over in Hard to Kill, Seagal in his quiet voice reassures an anxious colleague that they will be victorious against their foes: ‘You wanna know why? Superior attitude; superior state of mind.’

Most of the plots and direction in Seagal’s films are formulaic and followed to the letter. A literary reading of his work would criticise such films on account of their clichéd dialogue, but for Seagal such limitations have a productive effect because they concentrate viewers’ minds on fights and punchlines. In Hard to Kill, when Seagal realises that his nemesis is a corrupt senator whose favourite soundbyte is, ‘You can take that to the bank’, he vows to take him, ‘to the bank: the bloodbank.’ There is also a fight scene set around a pool table, which Seagal watchers have learned to treasure in his movies. Finally, at the senator’s house, he gives the baddies the runaround, leaving lipsticked messages on mirrors (‘ANTICIPATION OF DEATH IS WORSE THAN DEATH ITSELF’) as they try in vain to find him.

What is he, a national treasure?

By the early 1990s Seagal had acquired a reputation as a hard-hitting, even sadistic action hero (his trademark move is the arm break). Under Siege (1992) proved to be his big moment. He was pitted against bad guy Tommy Lee Jones, who was himself between finishing JFK and filming The Fugitive, and the film has as its heroine Erika Eleniak, who was then hot property after having completed a three-year stint in Baywatch.

Among other things, the success of Under Siege put Seagal’s place as the prince of the good bad film in doubt. It was regarded as a good action movie: well put together, well-paced, with a good cast, and well-delivered. The lines had a quotable coolness that was completely lacking in his earlier efforts, from the noirish ‘another cold day in hell’; to the ironic ‘I’m just a cook’; to the positively Shakespearian ‘You and I, we’re puppets in the same sick play.’

For some reason, however, Seagal’s career never really took off like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Sylvester Stallone’s. Under Siege made $83 million at the US box office. Compare this with Terminator 2 ($205 million) and the Rocky movies (combined total: $300 million). None of his other films has come close to making the same sort of money at the box office as Under Siege did. Perhaps audiences found him difficult to warm to. There was little in his films in the way of the kindness and sensitivity that modern action stars were supposed to portray, and his vision of retribution is laced with cruelty and spite. Seagal tends to star in films containing terrible human massacres, some of which his enemies are responsible for, but most of which are his own doing. His thrusting and aggressive model of heroism – he is always pushing ahead into enemy lines – adds to the feeling that his characters are either too good, or too bad, to be acceptable.

In this sense it was no surprise that weird American subcultures began to revere him. Virginian backwoods rockers The Royal Trux closed their 1998 album, Accelerator, with a fried tribute to their favourite vigilante hero. ‘Stevie (for Stevie S)’ opens to a keyed up, dreamy blues accompaniment with the line:

You can blame it on the atmosphere / over the plains

It sets a tone of offbeat reverence that proceeds completely unironically. The Royal Trux give fulsome praise to their hero, singing

You’re the man/ defender of the underdog…

while admitting what the rest of us had realised from the beginning:

You don’t know how cameras work / there’s just always someone there to fix ‘em…

What makes the Royal Trux tribute so fitting is that it acknowledges America’s continuing need for an action idol who was, in whatever elliptical way, of the people. Forecasters who had predicted the end of American action cinema after the end of the Cold War did not realise that the extreme, if righteous, vigilante movie was a long-established genre of the American film industry, which had its place alongside the western and the noir thriller. Think of Sam Fuller, Dirty Harry and Death Wish and you will begin to understand Steven Seagal outside of the confines of his familiar classification as a martial arts superstar. Royal Trux knew where they would pledge their allegiance:

People think that the United States are a sweet bowl of plastic flowers / but you’re thinking something else and man I’m with you.

No mere raised spliff to an idol of Generation X-ers, ‘Stevie’ is the real deal, a record of the violent hero in modern, unknown America. It remained to be seen whether the good bad film would be able to maintain such an intensity of following.

What does it take to change the essence of a man?

For many viewers of his films, Seagal’s bizarre attraction lies in his combination of vigilante and eco-warrior, the man who is above the law but who descends from his lofty perch to make impassioned speeches on behalf of Mother Nature. And if he never gave the slightest sign of appreciating the ironies of the former persona, he nevertheless presented an utterly authentic image of the latter. The solemn lecture at the end of his directorial debut, On Deadly Ground (1994), was as suprising a move as any he managed to pull on an unsuspecting assailant. At the end of countless killings and explosions on Alaskan oil rigs we hear him venting forth on…the Earth’s diminishing natural resources? Heads were shaken, eyes were rubbed, but the pictures kept on coming.

After picking up a Razzie Award for worst director while also being nominated for best film by the American Political Film Society he went on to star in a series of films in the late 1990s that encompassed his natural-spiritual message. In The Glimmer Man (1996) he plays another classic ‘Seagal’ character, the man with a hidden or secret past. Normally this is taken as a reference to Seagal’s personal history and the possibility that he may have worked for a while as a CIA agent. In films such as The Glimmer Man the thrill of espionage is allied to a taste for Tibetan prayer beads (he’s a practicing Buddhist), black robes, and wise sayings. The dark colours he is fond of wearing reflect his own mysterious identity. None of the other characters in his films is ever quite sure who he is, and in the most laboured ones, neither are we. Yet his enemies continue to be terrified of him. Brian Cox, who plays a treacherous former colleague in the secret service, explains to a fellow evil-doer the origin of Seagal’s nickname in The Glimmer Man, which was apparently acquired during combat operations in the rainforest: ‘First there’s the jungle, then you see a glimmer, then you’re dead.’

In Fire Down Below (1997) Seagal is a government agent who exposes illegal toxic dumping being carried out in a small southern US town. In The Patriot (1998) he plays a bioscientist/cowboy who crusades against the government’s stockpiling of toxins and biohazards. Always being the best in the business means that it is often a slow journey to enlightenment for the rest of the characters in his films. Worse still, many will need enlightenment beaten into them, and Seagal never takes pleasure in dealing blows. His violence always goes too far, demonstrating the extremity of his persona. For example, his insults can sometimes have a silly charm (‘If your daddy knew exactly how stupid you were, he'd trade you in for a pet monkey’) but more often they smack of verbal assault (‘Now get your ugly white ass outta here and don’t come back’).

All of which makes us wonder: did he see any contradiction at all between the brutal message of the vigilante and the spiritual one of man’s harmony with nature? I can’t imagine that he did. He has always stood for a spirituality that despite its pretences to understanding other cultures is peculiarly American in its desire to achieve personal fulfilment. It’s an ethical code, but not a fraternal one – it stands for doing the right thing by oneself. This is the formula that links cold-blooded narratives of revenge with metaphysical ruminations on nature. It is saying: ‘This is what I have become capable of, these are the things that hard work has put at my disposal.’

Love is eternal - and that's a long time

By the early years of the twenty-first century Seagal had passed fifty. He was also approaching portliness as his shirts got baggier and his lower eyelids began to droop. Years of CIA training could not have prepared him for such changes. Although he retained the ponytail and the symbols of ageless spirituality he had given up on trying to run in his movies (possibly not an unwise choice considering his gangly style), and he now preferred to pose as a stoic, almost sagelike figure who knew when and where his enemy would meet their downfall: the next time that they met. Such certainty in the face of terror used to be received by his fans as a gift. Now, his designated roles were becoming less those of an action hero than of an avenging natural therapist.

Everyone wants to see him try harder in his films but these days he’s too overweight and more aware than ever that he’s in a film to chase bad guys who are due their comeuppance anyway. What is more, he no longer seems to be bothered about the world in general. In the past, what made his films successful was not the credibility of Seagal’s performance but his own reassuring presence in the face of hysterical danger. Drifting aimlessly through so many straight to video movies has left the semblance of a career in cinema looking more forelorn than ever.

Exit Wounds (2001) and Half Past Dead (2002) were moderate box office successes in which he starred alongside rappers such as DMX and Ja Rule. Seagal has often preferred to act around groups who are under- represented in American films, be they African American or Chinese American or Eastern European, perhaps because the actors are cheaper to hire and it allows him to break into different markets. His worldwide success as a star of rental movies is undeniable, and it might be the only thing that has kept his career afloat for this length of time.

Ticker (2001) was directed by a man who has been described as ‘the new Ed Wood’, and it marks a real decline. Seagal looks old and weary for the first time. His black clothing now covers bulges whose cause is no mystery. The poor direction also makes a big difference as the action seems hurried and dull. Perhaps the advice he gives in the movie was meant for disappointed fans: ‘Learn the nature of your mind and then you won’t be suffering anymore.’ Subsequent films such as The Foreigner (2003) see him uncomfortably in Euroland, trading blows with Danes and other continental bad guys. In the real world, he has persevered despite accumulating beefs with Hollywood producers, the New York mafia, and a whole lot of film critics.

Throughout his time as an actor he has been involved in the production of his films. In 2005 he has already released two – Into the Sun and Submerged – and is slated to have four more due. The legend continues, somehow.

Who needs the goddamn movies anyway?

To return to a question that was hinted at the beginning: how do Steven Seagal’s films help us to define the good bad film? In a way, his strange career can only be understood by switching constantly between two points of view. On the one hand are those people who take pleasure in watching unintentionally funny films, and who enjoy violence only when there is no suggestion that it could be real. On the other hand are those people who genuinely idolise Seagal, who follow his words and study his moves, wishing to emulate him in real life. In this way the good bad film reiterates contemporary cultural life’s need for ethics. In viewing such films as Hard to Kill and Under Siege the reaction of many viewers will be split between ironic laughter bordering on condescension and a vague feeling of dread that for some people this stuff is going down like a hot dinner.

In bringing the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘ordinary’ person together, Orwell discovered something unique in the good bad poem. To bring Orwell’s language to life in the present day, it might be said that the good bad film doesn’t so much bring two kinds of person together as two sorts of reception: the serious and the comic. In so doing, it demands that the viewer has the courage to reject the passive ironic response to such films. More may be at stake than we realise. Far from being an obscure field of popular culture, the good bad film is ground on which a new type of criticism has the chance to flourish.