Watching a Steven Seagal movie these days is like going to McDonald's. You know it won't be very good, but you know exactly what to expect. Call us crazy but we can't help liking Mr. Seagal and watching his movies, most of which are just terrible. Some of his earlier efforts were good, well-made with decent scripts, but in more recent years, between him being grossly out of shape and scripts being written by some high school kid, not to mention the lack of budget, there just isn't much to recommend these flicks. In this outing, we have to have a highly-trained man who works outside the box to deliver a mysterious package to someone. Now the package is just a box wrapped in paper with strings tied around it. My initial thought was why the devil didn't they just ship it via UPS with no fuss and no muss? Nobody would even know it had been shipped and there was nothing about it to make it stand out. Of course then there would have been no story, and even with Mr. Seagal in charge of the package there wasn't much story. At one moment his unfailing marksmanship was deadly at any distance and at another he couldn't hit a guy across the room with a shotgun until the fourth try. As usual in this type of film everybody wants to kill Mr. Seagal but somehow he always comes through. There was absolutely no reason in the world to send the package anyway. The whole thing could have been handled by the shipper with a match. End of story. And of course, in this type of film, his handlers always want to eliminate Mr. Seagal. In one scene the baddie tells a top killer he wants Mr. Seagal dead and an empty folder at Langley tomorrow. Later, when he talks to his boss on the phone, he asks what his boss wants him to do about Mr. Seagal. I realize dead and an empty folder at Langley is pretty vague, but even so, I got the idea before this hit-man did. One other concern is that if you don't have the budget to make an action flick with lots of special effects, it's better to stick to something less spectacular, like a little love story or something. As I said above, we can't help liking Mr. Seagal. I especially loved him when he was posing as ship's cook and, despite the attack going on around him, spent a good deal of time worrying about his pies in the oven. So despite the deterioration of his films, I suppose we'll keep watching until there are no more.
Review of The Foreigner
