Last one for a while.  Promise.

Under Siege 2 is the same gag, so we’ll move onto this:

The story’s some bullshit about a mind control program.  There’s some scientist-type motherfucker that walks around in a white suit with a cane and a hat which really telegraphs the whole evil genius thing.  He’s definitely not using mind control to try and cure autism or something.  So there are a couple of unrelated scenes at the start.  There’s one of him arriving at a dam with a mouthy spanish-sounding clearly-renegade Colonel (the evil rank) and another one of some random group of soldiers / mercs who get dropped into a really stupid situation.  They jump out of a helicopter and take up the formation of a straight line.  They’re at the bottom of a hill.  But then they’re ambushed by a bunch of guys on the hill and on top of that one of them gets mind controlled to fuck and turns on the others.  The bit with the overacting colonel isn’t important.  The evil dam hideout gets blown up by something, I can’t remember but the soldiers do recur.  It’s all bullshit.

The first time we see Seagal is a huge way into the film.  It’s been too long and I can’t remember the exact circumstances but I think he and his unit are being held under indefinite court martial for disobeying orders or some such.  But I’m pretty sure they did it to save some people or something.  Anyway we’re introduced to them not through banter (although there’s lots of interminable ribbing so we know they’re a team) but by their names and specialties being stamped up on (I think) a freeze-frame.  It’s meant to let you know who they are, but it just lets you know they’re expendable so don’t get too attached.  So they’re enlisted to bust up the dam possibly and rescue the captured soldiers.  But along for the ride is Gorman from Aliens who represents either the agency that asks them to do the job even though they look more like the army or maybe he’s with someone else.  The NSA are usually the naughty agency, maybe he’s with them.  Whoever he’s with, he’s dirty.  They get around this by having Seagal’s team ditch him in what looks like a mean prank only to have it turn out there was a metric shit-tonne of bad guys waiting for them.  So as usual the plot is a peat bog of nonsense, but it trundles along better than Into the Sun because it has well-defined, if cartoonish, characters and somehow I didn’t find myself questioning it as much.  Maybe Into the Sun had tired me out.

I’m sure you’re wondering when the submerged part comes in.  Well, it’s soon.  Part of their escape plan was to exfiltrate (that’s a real word, check it) using a submarine that was housed at the dam? Maybe.  I’ve just realised how absurd that is.  Anyway, they get in and get the soldiers out in a battle with possibly the least thrilling climax I’ve ever seen.  A bunch of bad guys in fatigues (I can’t remember who they were and I don’t know if I knew at the time) and a TANK move towards our ragtag group of heroes through a big underground tunnel (like in Die Hard 3).  Now let me explain this further.  Seagal’s team, encumbered by unconscious marines, stand at one end of an enclosed cylinder with machine guns.  The bad guys, similarly equipped, but with a FUCKING TANK advance towards them down the tunnel.  Now, they’ve got the tank for cover.  Seagal’s group take no cover whatsoever.  They swap some very unengaging gunfire in which I think no-one gets hit.  Then Seagal rushes out and beats all of the soldiers hand to hand.  I can’t remember what happened to the tank.  They get everyone onto the submarine and submerge the fuck.  The special effects for this are surprisingly ok.

After they’re on the sub it takes a really fucking long time for the inevitable to happen: the soldiers they rescued turn and try to kill everyone and destroy the sub.  Before that we get a lot of bullshit posturing between Seagal’s ex-girlfriend and the scientist woman I forgot to mention they picked up somewhere.  This whole submerged sequence lasts maybe fifteen minutes.  A bunch of mercs whose names you don’t remember get killed, Seagal and a few others escape, including Vinnie Jones and the two girls.

The rest of the film is a blur to me.  The finale happens at an opera where one of the mind-controlled people is meant to be assassinating someone.  There’s a bunch of shooting, Vinnie Jones dies what feels like a disproportionately violent death for the character and then some of them end up in a secret lab somewhere and all of the villains die with bleeding eyes.  We’d both gotten pretty tired of it by this point, but we were never as bored as in Into the Sun or The Glimmer Man.  We were confused, yes, but it was that kind of confusion you can let wash over you when you know it’s w delightfully badly told story you’re failing to keep up with instead of Memento or something.

What I haven’t yet mentioned is the most important aspect of this entire escapade: Over half of Steven Seagal’s lines are not spoken by Steven Seagal.  I’ve noticed a little bit of overdubbung here and there in the other films but this isn’t tidying up, this is just all the time.  In fact, the distribution is so close to 50/50 that it never feels like there’s one voice, so it’s not like either of them is jarring or out of place, it’s just this wonderfully surreal experience of watching a character with two voices.  I don’t know why some of the lines were looped.  Apparently the film was originally conceived as having mutants somewhere so obviously the script went through some changes and I imagine they dubbed it to try and hold the damn thing together, but some of the strangest lines are overdubbed.  Anyway, this was the first movie Pod and I watched where the looped dialogue was this ridiculous and blatant and frequent.  I imagine the effect will become tiresome eventually, but we enjoyed this as a grand foray into silliness, bafflement and beautiful, innocent ineptitude.

Up Next: Out For Justice 

Vern gave this one a pretty good review and the fact that it was released theatrically in Japan, that I knew it had sword fights and that it has that hilariously awesome cover were all pointing towards this being another favourite, but I’m sorry to say it fell very short of the mark.  Perhaps to appreciate it the way Vern did you have to see Out of Reach in between, because next to the mind-blowing Belly of the Beast it just doesn’t really measure up.  Seagal plays Travis Hunter, a (possibly) ex-CIA man who now runs a sword dealership in Japan.  Again, SPOILERS:  Some bullshit happens to some politician and then the young Yakuza are teaming up with the Chinese Tongs nad not respecting the old Yakuza.  Seagal’s old CIA boss calls him in as an expert in these matter since he grew up in a rough neighbourhood and then dispatches him to do…well I’m not sure but his rookie partner, Agent Mack, is along for the ride.  Then some bad shit happens to someone Seagal loves and to someone he doesn’t love but is associated with, so finally he goes and kills a bunch of people with a sword.  Boom.

This is one big long movie of Steven Seagal fucking about.  The movie gets set up in the first ten or so minutes (despite it’s horribly self-important title sequence: ooohhh asian letters…on fire!) and then for the next hour, the entire fucking hour, we get to see either Seagal or his partner or the Yakuza assholes fuck about doing absolutely nothing and then there’s a big sword fight.  That’s a bit unfair.  There are a couple of other action sequences.  There’s an admittedly pretty good fight in a market and there’s an old-school over in five seconds sequence where Seagal goes in and kills a bunch of people in an apartment with a sword and a fight with a Tong Lieutenant who ends up going out the window.  So that’s four action sequences, which you might say isn’t bad for straight-to-DVD stuff, and it isn’t, but it’s the fact that everything in between is so inane that makes the fights unengaging.

I really can’t stress how much I didn’t care about what the fuck Seagal was doing in this movie.  He goes about and talks to a bunch of different people and we’re supposed to figure out who they are, how Seagal knows them and how they figure into the gang war that’s going on between the younger Yakuza/Tongs and the older Yakuza.  He talks to some old Chinese motherfucker that maybe trained him?  He gives him a young Chinese girl who’s going to be his shield.  Later on I think he brings a message from Seagal to someone and is never seen again.  In one following scene it’s implied that he’s fine, but in another he doesn’t seem to be.  He talks to a different old Japanese motherfucker who’s connected to one or both factions of the Yakuza in some way, it’s never really explained because he isn’t directly involved in the ultimate Yakuza counter attack.  That’s a group of old Yakuza led by some old dude who won’t act but then he gets killed by the young ones for no other reason than for the younger (but still old) lieutenant to take over and strike back.  Seagal talks to both of these guys at different points.  There’s another Japanese dude that seems to meet Seagal at a club and who he trusts but I don’t remember meeting him and I had no idea who he represents.  On top of this Seagal has a young inept partner arbitrarily assigned to him by his CIA boss (the reporter from Die Hard 1 & 2) who serves no purpose other than to provide bad comic relief and get himself killed.  Then there was also that Senator getting killed.  That was never resolved, nor was the fact that Chiaki Kuriyama seemed to be his daughter.  And I defy you to make any goddamn sense out of the entire sequence leading up to Agent Mack’s demise.

If all that seems confusing then good, because I have no idea what the fuck happened in this movie and I’ve got lots of other things to watch before I consider giving this any more of my time.  It’s better than The Foreigner, though because at least the people here have identities instead of “The Package” or “a conduit”.  Fuck, there’s also a tattoo artist who is apparently Seagal’s link to the Yakuza (he just does their tattoos so he isn’t a criminal, nothing shady) but he meets with at least the super-boss before he goes anywhere near this guy so I don’t know what’s happening.  I liked the character, though, and so must the director because he randomly gets included in the climactic battle where it’s suddenly revealed that apparently one of the young Yakuza guys killed his family.  This is never mentioned before.  They just needed to crowbar in some motivation for him.  There’s a lot of subtext about young versus old and lack of respect and the next generation always moving to greater extremes but it’s all lost in an incoherent plot.  All of this bullshit adds up to the movie committing the cardinal sin of any bad movie: it’s dull.  A movie can be as bad as it wants as long as there something there to make you want to watch.  This film drags like a motherfucker.  It’s interminable.  By the time the final fight happens you just want it to end so you can watch Submerged and I can think of no greater indictment than that.

The only thing that stops the bullshit is the fact that a club owner who Seagal gets information one is killed, seemingly because she seems nervous around the boisterous, armed, unpredictable Yakuza boys in her club.  If they know she’s talking to Seagal then we sure as fuck don’t know they know.  But the thing about this club owner is that apparently she’s Seagal’s fucking fiancé.  He seems to like her (why not, she’s pretty hot) and says things like “I love you, babe”, but it always seemed that he was saying it more like Kojak, but no he actually meant the he loved her loved her, like in stories.  Because in the middle of all this fucking about we suddenly end up in a park with Seagal proposing to this girl and I would have been completely surprised if I didn’t already know it was coming from Seagalogy.  Then they have some really awkward sex.  Back at her place, not in the the park.  Anyway, she gets killed and then Seagal finally does something, yay.

There are some really annoying transitions, presumably due to mink(small m)’s history as a music video director and there’s a huge technical problem the UK DVD at least.  There’s a lot of Japanese and a lot of Chinese spoken in this movie.  Sometimes there are exchanges where Seagal’s speaking English and someone else is speaking one of the other languages, but on the DVD track I couldn’t find a subtitle track where only the non-English languages were subtitled.  If it’s there it’s definitely not the default one.  I don’t like watching people speak in English with English subtitle because you end up reading ahead of their delivery and missing the performance.  I always turn them off in videogames and I did not appreciate having to keep them on if I wanted to try and have some semblance of what was happening.  To me this is a huge problem and someone needs to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

It’s not all bad.  The movie looks nice and the fights are technically pretty good.  I can’t remember the bit in the market very well but the sword quick kills were pretty cool (although they happen before Mrs Seagal to be gets killed, I think, and I don’t know what gives Seagal the authority to just go and execute a rabble of Yakuza) and the fight with the Tong Lieutenant actually sees Seagal take a hit.  He ends up going through some glass that turns out to be a 15th storey window, with was a complete (and welcome) surprise.  The last fight’s a bit weird because the little Chinese girl is by far the most engaging and impressive to watch, so when Seagal shows up and does his thing it’s a little underwhelming.  Tattoo guy seems to only be there to get battle-damaged (but I don’t think they made action figures for this movie) and I can’t even remember how Seagal does the last guy in.  Although to be fair I can’t remeber that from Belly of the Beast either.  All of the sword fighting is nice since we don’t see much of it (except when he’s slicing arrows OUT OF THE FUCKING AIR) but since the rest of the movie is so dull I’m never really invested in the characters or engaged in their fights.

It was nice to see Seagal back in his old stomping grounds in Japan and he seems to be enjoying being there and it translates into his performance but not the film as a whole, which is utterly joyless.  I quite liked a lot of the supporting cast, particularly the old young yakuza who seems to have broken away from the old guard and is enjoying excess for the first time in his life at a much older age.  He’s delightfully slimy although ends up saying a lot of weird sexual stuff before mini Chinese girl kills his ass.  There are also some weird, but killer lines in there, like “What the fuck is an American doing swing a sword around?” or “I couldn’t sleep well knowing I hadn’t chopped off your balls yet” or “Battles are not decided by skill or technique, but by whoever has the most furious mind”.

With a more carefully planned script, some clear reason for why a scene is taking place and some better pacing this could have been a much better film, but as it stands it’s a dull, forgettable entry that looks nice with a few good sword fights and some great lines.

Up next: Submerged

Be warned that in this and every other post there will be spoilers in the classical sense.  I know I don’t watch these films to see how the story unfolds so I don’t know if I would technically consider them “spoilers” because they don’t actually detract from my enjoyment.

Belly of the Beast is set in Thailand and it really helped to see Seagal somewhere a bit more visually interesting.  After the quagmire of inane plot and endlessly shifting allegiances in The Foreigner it was good to see that this film went with a simpler hook:  Seagal’s daughter is kidnapped.  Now, the reasons behind this are murky.  At least two of the factions involved are pretending to do something when they’re doing another and on a single viewing I have to confess that I don’t actually know what everyone was up to.  So there’s a whole tangled mess going on in the background, but none of that really concerns Seagal: his character just sort of cuts through it as he stomps around Thailand looking for his daughter.  He ultimately figures out where she is but I have no idea how because the last two characters he’s in contact with before the final battle he kills without questioning.  But anyway, somehow he finds out where she is and then rescues her and brings down holy hell on a bunch of people in between and for the first time ever I think I mean that literally  since there’s magic and an evil (possibly satanic) sorcerer-type fellow involved.  Also, Ryu from Street Fighter (Byron Mann to give the man his dues) is along for the ride, playing a former partner of Seagal turned Buddhist monk seeking redemption.

I think the most important thing to know about this film is that it’s fucking nuts, given that when I tried to do a synopsis above I just talked about the crazy bits and then had to admit that I didn’t follow enough of the plot to actually write a synopsis.  The madness is well established by the credits and the totally-unrelated-to-the-rest-of-the-film scene that follows.  The title “Belly of the Beast” appears and lingers over the body of a naked, voluptuous woman swimming though a pool.  I have no idea why she’s naked or swimming and it can’t be totally for titillation because we only see her back and even then the water’s distorting it, but it’s still a naked chick in a pool so I’m enjoying it, but I’m deeply confused.  That’s essentially the rest of the film.  It turns out that the woman in the pool is completely inconsequential and never reappears so enjoy her when you can.  What follows is one of the most non-sensical but clearly stand-out scenes in the whole film.

It’s a sequence in which Segal (+ young, toned, attractively sweaty body double) infiltrate a house undetected and steal a disc.  Seagal’s big stunt is doing a forward roll when there’s absolutely no necessity to do so.  It’s hilarious, bringing to mind the explosion forward roll in The Glimmer Man (one of only a few moments worth watching in that film).  Then something very strange happens and now that I think about it should have clued me in to the magical nature of the film.  There’s a guard pacing and a small raised bit of marble.  So Seagal wants to move unseen using the raised marble as cover.  He’s getting on, so I’d forgive him for crawling, but he decides to slide past it on his side feet first.  What they were going for was like when Tony Jaa goes under the jeep in Ong-Bak but that’s not how it looks.  It’s an effect that could only have been achieved by tying something to Seagal’s feet and pulling him along.  It looks absurd, but it’s amazing.  It was A-B repeated on our viewing.  The scene is capped off by him exiting through the back door in the kitchen, but just as he’s about to leave he stops and swivels and you expect maybe a dude’s spotted him, but no, he saunters over to the fridge and steals a bottle of water, going to so far as to drink it there in the kitchen.  I can’t remember if he keeps the bottle or not but after he drinks he turns around and gives the house a Nod of Justice.  The kind of nod you’d give your old house before you walked out the front door for the last time.  It’s fantastic.

I really liked Belly of the Beast.  It’s always engaging, if not coherent, but the knowledge that Seagal is trying to rescue his daughter gives adequate justification for all of his actions.  There are some really great hand-to-hand fights and even though there’s a lot of double use sometimes it is Seagal and he looks pretty good.  There’s a fantastic bit where Seagal and Ryu are attacked by Sword-wielding Ninjas led by a transvestite (don’t ask, I don’t know either) and the fight’s really amazing, and I don’t mean amazing in the same way I did for the first scene, I mean this is a great fight and Byron Mann’s stuff is really solid.  There’s a shoot-out in a train yard with a John Woo trolley and an amazing bit where a stunt-man jumps out of a train car shooting twin pistol but they cut to close-ups of Seagal and he’s  not falling the way he should be. It’s hilariously unphysical.  There’s an amazing cartoon moment in a police station where Seagal gets a bit rowdy and is suddenly surrounded by about 12 guns and Byron Mann does an incredible gun disarm that got A-B repeated.

Beyond the action, the acting is solid and there’s no distracting over-dubbed dialogue.  The relationship between Seagal and Ryu is well-played and I was almost as interested in his story as I was in Seagal’s.  The villains are villainous, the old friends are suitably questionable and the film looks great.  There are also plenty of What the Fuck is he Wearing? moments to keep the fans happy.

This is all preamble.  Where shit gets real is in the final battle.  It’s one of the most cinematic climaxes I’ve ever seen, and it was straight-to-DVD.  Seagal and Ryu special ops their way into a castle (there’s no reason for it to be a castle, it just makes it more climactic) to rescue Seagal’s daughter and her friend who were kidnapped.  It’s very well choreographed.  I always like sequences where I feel like the action heroes are doing something other than running and having all of their bullets hit because their in an action movie.  Ryu stays behind to guard the girls from what looks like infinitely spawning enemies which gives Seagal an opportunity to face off against the big bad.  The sequence is really phenomenal.  It starts with the other motherfucker standing across the room shooting arrows at Seagal, which Seagal shoots or slices OUT OF THE FUCKING AIR.  The sequences are CG but they look really fucking good.  Eventually things get more up close and all of the fighting is brutal and kinetic but then suddenly Seagal gets voodoo dolled by the evil sorcerer guy!  But then the order of monks that Ryu was a part of all pray the shit out of the sorcerer guy so Seagal can take care of business.  It’s almost completely out of the blue and it’s totally insane but I’ve never seen anything like it and it makes a brilliantly over-the-top battle so much better.  It pushes the scene and the film over the edge of OTT and I know that doesn’t make metaphorical or grammatical sense but that’s in keeping with the film.  I don’t know what’s beyond that edge, but I do know that I want to visit it again.

Next up: Into the Sun

Just a little proof that the man did kick an amazing amount of ass when he was young.  He uses a lot of this stuff in the earlier films.

This proves that Steven Seagal > Chuck Norris.  In the nineties, when Chuck Norris jumped ship to the small screen he made Walker: Texas Ranger, a fantasy about him being a Texas Ranger.  When Seagal makes the same move to TV (he held on fifteen years longer) he does what is (ostensibly) a documentary series about what he actually does when he’s an actual cop.