*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steven Seagal, Michelle Goh, Corey Johnson, Kata Dobó
screenplay by Dennis Dimster
directed by Michael Oblowitz
by Bill Chambers The other day, my friend and I were at the CNE, Toronto's annual expo of overpriced amusements, when we got a hankering for the raw sewage peddled inside its flea-market-sized food court. Where we wound up eating was at Kentucky Style Chicken, one of the many transient take-outs named for maximum copyright infringement and serving a synthetic mock-up of the already-inedible. Out for a Kill exists in the same spirit: Steven Seagal's first direct-to-video production in weeks, its designation combines the titles of his early pictures Hard to Kill and Out for Justice while mixing and matching nearly every trend, past and present, of the martial arts genre, on whose outskirts Seagal has toiled throughout his film career. Here, imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery, it's a cloaking device–"Doesn't this remind you of something?" vs. "Boy, does this stink." You know something? Sometimes I get a hankering for movies I know I'll regret, too.
The fallen Seagal, once funny-funny, now pathetic-funny (he's Tara Reid in a girdle), plays Robert Burns–not the one who wrote "Auld Lang Syne," but a, yes, Yale-described "academician" (did Homer Simpson write this?) who educated himself to become The World's Greatest Archaeologist while incarcerated for grand larceny. I guess the great thing about a prison term is the wealth of information you can glean from it in the field of archaeology. Digging for God knows what in the Far East, Robert discovers that the Chinese Mafia are smuggling narcotics in his artifacts (rather, he fails to ignore the indiscreet henchmen doing the planting), but it takes more than mere drug-trafficking to get Seagal off the couch and into medieval mode these days, so he stocks up on revenge fuel by getting his cute Asian partner (Elaine Tan) killed in a hail of bullets and then being out of the house–where his (gratuitously nude) wife sleeps, where his children, if he had some, would play with their toys–when it digitally explodes.
Well, the DVD cover synopsis ends around there, and telling you what happens next is like trying to describe a dream where you're in a tuxedo but you're at school but there's a horse. At one point, Professor Robert walks into the "Hidden Dragon" barbershop, a drooling crazy materializes, and some awfully cagey editing gives the victory to the walrus-like Seagal in the fight that ensues. Buddha is invoked (Buddha, I'll bet, has never come this close to suing); the Propaganda Pictures aesthetic is somehow rendered more oppressive; hot, naked strippers appear, are shot, and then reappear in hot, naked flashbacks to the good old minutes before they were shot; and a Dr. Evil-type boardroom table loses its multiculti satellites one by one as Robert proves contractually invincible. And through it all, Robert, sadly, talks just like his indecipherable namesake because Seagal has, y'know, taken more than a few blows to the head by now. (Poet Robert Burns: "Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool;" Winthrop Award-winning Academician Robert Burns: "I look very much forward to my next dig in China.") Order me the high colonic.
THE DVD
Columbia TriStar presents the film in a stellar 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer on DVD–Out for a Kill should neither look nor sound this good, but presentation is everything, as anyone who's actually paid for KSC will tell you. Unfortunately, each and every time the subtitles identify a new location (which is to say, at the start of every single goddamn scene), they stay on–if there's one thing that can definitely kill brain cells, it's reading Steven Seagal. Audio is thunderous Dolby Digital 5.1. This is a good soundtrack for sinus-clearing, perhaps, but the search for aural nuance continues. Trailers for Out for a Kill, Double Vision, and The Foreigner (starring Seagal as "Jonathan Cold") round out the disc.
90 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono), Portuguese DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish, Portuguese subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Columbia TriStar
