Into the sun (2005) - Steven Seagal strikes again (Spoilers).

[Neville]

I can't hide it: from the days of "The Foreigner" and "Half Past Dead", I have a soft spot for the cheesy DVD vehicles he now stars in. More recently, I had great times with "Out for a kill".

I just can't help it. watching his lame martial arts movements, his full of himself speeches, and the lunatic plots he is involved in , I experiment some kind of fun similar to when I watch old Monthy Python gags, like the oen where John Cleese plays a Karata instructor.

This is why is so sad for me to tell everybody on the board to avoid "Into the sun", one of his last efforts. The movie is simply quite dull, and it spends too much time in japanese characters (the film is partially funded by japanese producers) and too little on Seagal and his attempts to stop a war between yakuzas. Even the big payoff scene, which involves Seagal and some other characters killing yakuzas with swords is just a blatant rip-off from "Yakuza" (1975), one of my favourite films.

It's really a pity, because the people involve (Seagal included, he wrote the story) keep on bringing the cheese in great ammounts. He not only is constantly praised of his martial skills, but also told that "he looks younger than ever" and stuff like that, as if this was one of those Connie Selleca's TV films. Seagal, in case you wonder, looks older and chubbier than ever, something he tries to disguise moving around under like a dozen layers of clothing.

And there's also a great prologue set in the golden triangle where super-spy Seagal blows up an operation by shooting a henchman with his silenced weapon, and, not happy with that, then uses the henchman UNSILENCED weapon to kill some other people before he and his partner -who of course is wounded- escape Nam style. Of course, the incident is never mentioned and it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

Not to mention how constantly Seagal is so careless about his informers, partners or love interests, that they are often killed or attacked while he is offscreen mentioning that "they'll be fine". Great work, Steven.

The "love interest" bit deserves its own paragraph. Seagal here tries to show us how he is also a ladies' man, so we are subjected to one scene where he declarses his love to a japanese 20 years old girl (the scene itself feels like Jane Austen writing soap operas) and then telling her exactly what to do the rest of her life. Wow. I'll be polite for once and won't describe the scene later where they are seen making out.

[Archivist]

Oh heck, not another one.  I was a big Seagal fan up to Under Siege 2.  After that they all went downhill (Exit Wounds being the exception, Half Past Dead not so bad either).

I bought the Seagal movie 'Ticker' on DVD because of a few rave reviews on Amazon.  I (stupidly) ignored the abysmal reviews.  I am now convinced that the people who wrote the spectacular reviews are disgruntled purchasers of the DVD who want to spread the horror.

Ticker is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.  Absolutely riddled with inconsistencies and plot holes, horrible acting, bad direction, scenes that make no sense and are obviously from another movie, etc.  In the director's commentary, they actually admit and CONGRATULATE themselves on using scenes from another movie!  They say that this is a regular practice in European movies, and to use that technique in Ticker gives it a 'European' feel!

They also congratulate themselves for making this movie in about 12 days, two days more than the average one-hour TV show.  Well, if they had made something the calibre of a good X-Files episode, then we could be talking, but this was just hideous.

It sounds like Into The Sun is in the same vein.  Thanks for the heads-up, I will avoid with alacrity.

~Archivist~