By Geno McGahee
“I’m gonna fuck you up ugly.” – Steven Seagal
In 1988, it all began. ABOVE THE LAW launched the career of action star, Steven Seagal, and it continued the gritty style of film that Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson had done before his arrival. Seagal had a lot of great films, including HARD TO KILL, MARKED FOR DEATH, OUT FOR JUSTICE, UNDER SIEGE, ON DEADLY GROUND and FIRE DOWN BELOW. He owned the 1990s and had a great comeback in 2001 with EXIT WOUNDS. Unfortunately, his big screen days were over after the mediocrity that is HALF PAST DEAD and the straight to video Seagal was born.
From 2000 to 2010, Seagal made 26 movies. He was pumping them out and as much as many like to say that his straight to video entries were complete shit, that is not entirely true. Granted, they are not as good as his early work. Nowhere near it, but there are some gems in the mix, including URBAN JUSTICE and TODAY YOU DIE. The 2009 “A DANGEROUS MAN” started out with some promise but quickly nose-dived. Some elements were there to make a good movie but it never came together.
We begin with Holly (Aidan Dee), the hot wife of Shane Daniels (Steven Seagal). She is sitting in their car and awaiting the return of her husband. A thug shows up and tries to rob/rape/kill her and Shane comes out of the shadows and beats him down. The thug makes a run for it and Shane gives chase. When the police find the thug, he is dead and Daniels is arrested for murder and sent away six years before he is proven innocent and released. Unfortunately, his wife did not wait for him and he is now alone and miserable.
Daniels cannot help but to run into scum. He stops at a liquor store and meets up with two thugs and that want to rob him. He threatens to “fuck them up ugly” and does just that. Up to this point in my life, I had never witnessed anyone being fucked up ugly but it wasn’t a pretty thing. Shane leaves one of the guys in a mangled heap and then gives his friend a beating.
Example of “fucked up ugly.”
After stealing a car, Shane needs to dispose of it and the best way to do that is to blow it up. While setting the car on fire, two Russian guys stumble upon two Chinese guys killing a cop. The Chinese guys open fire on the Russian guys but only Sergey (Jesse Hutch) gets away, thanks in large part to Shane Daniels. Remarkably, Daniels never really takes any damage in this film. He just kicks everyone’s ass. The Chinese guys are fucked up ugly and Daniels asks Sergey for a ride only to discover that the Chinese guys had a hostage. Tia (Marlaina Mah) gets rescued and the three are en route to the next town over.
This is where the movie began to lose me. Tia mentions that her uncle is an accountant and that he is tied in with the Chinese military and the poppy seed business and can’t come to the states because he is on a watch list. So, she was dealing with some shady characters to bring him over illegally and got all her friends shot and killed and herself kidnapped for ransom. Daniels is still on the case and he never loses a fight and won’t let anyone hurt her now.
In the meantime, Sergey meets up with his father, Vlad (Vitaly Kravchenko). Vlad sells stolen cars and has no respect for authority. When a couple of crooked cops show up to give him hell, he states: “Where I come from, we fuck cops in the mouth when we run out of farm animals.” How is this an insult? When I’m not forcing a farm animal to give me oral sex, I look for a cop to do it. I don’t think that this is common practice on farms in Russia but it sent the message home. The cop did not want to mess with a guy that is bigger than him and has forced animals to suck him off. That is the last guy that you want to mess with.
It’s now the Chinese mob against Shane, Sergey, Vlad and Tia in a big showdown, and Shane does not lose a fight. It goes through the normal motions of most action finales and leads to a happy ending where Shane can stop fucking up people ugly. There is hinted romance between Shane and Tia and all the bad guys die.
A DANGEROUS MAN started out with a lot of promise. As a huge Seagal fan, I’m always looking for that magic again and there was some of it capture here. Written and directed by Keoni Waxman, A DANGEROUS MAN does some things very good and some things not so good. The action sequences are actually very good and the cast is well placed. Vitaly Kravchenko did a great job as the tough Russian mobster. So too did Jesse Hutch and Marlaina Mah, but the biggest issue is that the screenplay ran out of steam. There are parts where it’s very clunky and lost. Waxman understood what he wanted to do but I wish he had spent a little more time developing this one.
I reluctantly recommend A DANGEROUS MAN. In the end, I did enjoy it but it was definitely missing something. It is worth a watch if you just want to see Seagal fuck up somebody ugly.
Rating: 5/10
