That's why the idea of Seagal routinely thwarting their every move was so amusing. These two very human villains, who were so full of raucous, nasty life, were being beaten by a man completely devoid of emotion or charisma--a homicidal automaton. They were two Wile E. Coyotes being humiliated by a lardassed, karate-chopping Road Runner. When Seagal finished off Jones by pushing a thumb through his eye, sticking a knife in his forehead, and shoving him face-first into a computer screen, his expression suggested that he'd just finished taking out the garbage. He was as merciless and inhuman as the weather.
Unfortunately, this time, the joke isn't on Seagal anymore: it's on us. Like the enjoyably wretched ecothriller On Deadly Ground, this one spends an inordinate amount of screen time building up our hero as the ultimate fighting machine--a cross between Dirty Harry, Bruce Lee, Oliver North, and TV's McGyver. "Do you have any idea who we're dealing with here?" asks the apprehensive McGill, a sandblasted warrior who looks like he could probably bend Seagal over his knee and paddle his gelatinous butt in real life. This is the kind of movie where the hero gets on the radio at the end and announces to his superiors that he just saved the day, and a roomful of people bursts into sustained applause. If you won't cheer Seagal, he'll cheer himself.
Director Geoff Murphy, a New Zealand stylist whose aboriginal revenge parable Utu was praised by Pauline Kael as one of the most powerful movies of the '80s, moved to America soon after. To date, he's done nothing else of note, churning out a series of progressively more expensive and less interesting action pictures, including Young Guns 2 and Freejack. This one doesn't even offer brutish, nasty pleasures. It doesn't serve up anything stylish in the way of editing, camera movement, or fight choreography--all of which partly redeem even the stupidest action movies by John Woo, Walter Hill, and Andrew Davis.
The film's much-publicized state-of-the-art digital compositing technology, which was partly responsible for swelling the picture's budget to $70 million, is only intermittently successful. Sometimes special-effects supervisor Richard Yurichich seamlessly merges sets and miniatures and moving backgrounds so that you can't tell where reality leaves off and fantasy begins, but other times the results look like the filmmakers borrowed a used rear-projector from the producers of "The Love Boat." (There's one real innovation: thanks to the miracle of computers, rather than strategically cutting away at the last moment, we can now follow people who've tumbled off a high cliff as they bounce from rock to jagged rock.)
Even cheesier is director Murphy's attempt to hype his star through photographic and editing tricks. He shoots the fight scenes very close up, using a telephoto lens to blur Seagal's movements and make them look more mysterious and less clunky. And unless my eye deceived me, it looks like he also snipped out frames of film every now and then to artificially speed up key punches, kicks, and flips. Now that's a trick I haven't seen employed since "The Lone Ranger."
It's all for naught, though, because no matter what life-threatening situations Ryback gets himself into, he always looks utterly disinterested, and Seagal, who keeps getting slower and fatter and more pompous with each new movie, is too unconvincing as a silent-but-deadly death dealer to distract us through sheer violence.
Only two things mark this movie as noteworthy: one is that for the first time in my memory, Seagal actually allows a villain to strike him. But of course, it's just one hit, and the other guy gets bounced around the room like a handball in retaliation.
The other is the picture's title: this is the first Seagal movie that doesn't flow organically from the advertising-ready phrase Steven Seagal Is... Does this signal some kind of creative advancement? I hope not, because I always hoped he'd someday star in a film whose title revealed the true secret behind Seagal's invincibility: Steven Seagal Is...A Wuss.
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Warner Bros. Steven Seagal, Eric Bogosian. Written by Richard Hatem and Matt Reeves. Directed by Geoff Murphy. Now showing.
Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home. Warner Bros. Jason James Richter, August Schellenberg, Michael Madsen. Written by Karen Janszen, Corey Blechman, and John Mattson. Directed by Dwight Little. Opens July 21.
