TinsHeadline Touches You

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Comeuppance Reviews A bunch of Chinese gangsters are using their international network to smuggle drugs. Their evil operations infringe upon the happy-go-lucky life of Yale professor Robert Burns (Seagal) and all hell breaks loose. On an innocent fact-finding mission, Burns discovers that they are using ancient artifacts to conceal their drugs. After some fights and shootouts, Burns realizes he must track down all those responsible for ruining his life. Unleashing the awesome power within all Yale professors, he beats up, maims and kills across several continents, using their arm tattoos as clues as to where to go next. Will anyone survive when professor Robert Burns goes OUT FOR A KILL? Latter-day Seagal meets Nu-Image. We could just stop there, because you probably know what to expect (assuming you don't already feel like you've seen the movie), but we'll continue. At the beginning of the movie, the first scene in fact, a bunch of unsmiling guys in suits walk in slow motion into a Bulgarian strip club. Guess what happens next? You can no doubt guess, but what if we told you it involved REPEATED FOOTAGE? Then we go to Paris where a bunch of gangsters are sitting around a table. On the screen we get a bunch of fun facts about their personal lives and hobbies. We don't know why. All we can assume is that this is the "Anti-Seagal Club" because all they do is complain about him. It seems to be the basis of their organization. We can reasonably assume there's a crudely painted sign on the door that says "no girls allowed".Finally we move to beautiful New Haven, Connecticut (not really, it's probably a blue screen or possibly a green screen. What an insult to our fair city). We are, as an audience, finally ready to meet professor Robert Burns. He's receiving an award because he's such a talented and great man. Those stodgy Yalies probably thought they were giving the award to the national poet of Scotland Robert Burns (1759-1796). The similarities between him and Seagal are uncanny. Nevertheless, he then dons his leather jacket and becomes "Indiana Seagal", bearing no resemblances to any other badass archaeology professors.The rest of the movie is your typical Seagallian morass of unintentionally funny ADR work, unintentionally funny Martial Arts fights and unintentionally funny green screen shots. There are even some Sniper-style "bullet time" shots. Add to that some silly quick cuts and zooms, and there you have it. Besides the references to Yale and 18th century lyric poets, the highbrow literary references continue when Seagal goes to (what no doubt must be one of his favorite haunts) the "Cafe Sartre". Trust us, you'll be feeling the "Nausea" if you watch this movie.But really, there are enough funny and/or silly moments in this movie to make it rise above the level of other Seagal "Kill" movies such as Driven To Kill or Kill Switch. Speaking of the title, it's just an unashamed mash-up of two of Seagal's "classic" titles, Out For Justice (1991) and Hard to Kill (1990). Except "Out For A Kill" makes no sense. But it does sound like Seagal, in a domestic situation, calls to his wife in another room in their suburban house as he's walking out the door, "Honey, I'm going out for a kill, be back in twenty minutes..." Sadly this scene didn't happen in this movie. How disappointing.In all, Out For A Kill has enough decent moments (be they unintentional or not) to keep this latter-day Seagal outing's head above water. Barely. However, there are certainly worse Seagal movies out there (*cough*KillSwitch*cough*).

mazec666 Continuing with Seagal Month, "Out for a Kill" from 2003 is among the few movies he's made for Millennium Films. Budgeted at $14 million, this has better production values than "Flight of Fury" and that's not saying much. Clocking in at around 90 minutes, this feels like a four-hour biology lecture.Our portly Buddha white boy plays Robert Burns (not the late production designer on the original "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre"), an unorthodox professor who wears leather coats on digging expeditions because he's cool. Or he might be covering his enormous gut whichever you figure out. After discovering ancient Chinese artifacts, Seagal finds himself chased by a million bad guys in a poorly-choreographed car chase where his female partner is murdered. He reaches the border and gets framed in this low-budget rendition of "Midnight Express." While spending a short amount of time in prison, Seagal befriends a stereotypical black guy who doesn't have anything to do with this film. Upon his release Seagal reunites with his wife whose also forgotten about and is killed in a superimposed explosion. Predictably, Seagal goes on a violent killing spree breaking the arms of every nameless Chinese extra in a series of over-the-top fight scenes that are desperately mimicking "The Matrix." The film is padded with scenes of the villain and his men sitting in a long table with subtitles and title cards galore reminding us of their dastardly deeds. "Out for a Kill" is sleazy-looking for a direct-to-DVD action film and does it show. The computer-generated effects are the most horrible I've ever seen and so are the unconvincing backdrops. I swear, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" has Oscar-caliber FX and producing design compared to this. And the editing is like Paul W.S. Anderson on cocaine. The below-average but great-to-laugh-at fight scenes aren't any better. The good news is Seagal is doubled much less. But the bad news is that they are poorly edited to the max. However, Seagal's performance doesn't fare better as his voice constantly changes from his own to someone else. Also noted is that Seagal is filmed in the shadows to hide his oily skin and multiple chins. That is a prime example of laziness at its highest form. The other actors are even worse. Michelle Goh may be attractive but her performance is awful, awful, awful. Corey Johnson is only in the film until he's bumped off and collects a paycheck.Did I mention that "Out for a Kill" is terrible? No. But it is. And at least it wasn't a stock footage movie.

I_John_Barrymore_I It should be one of those films where by the time it's over you couldn't name a single character, yet Steven Seagal shares a name with the most famous Scottish poet so you can't help but remember at least one.It's surprisingly well-lit for a post-millennium Seagal offering but this is a mixed blessing. While it's pleasing to see him in something other than a face-only Col. Kurtz impersonation, the fact he's (reasonably) well lit merely makes him look like what he is - fat. The fights are cumbersome and not a single blow impresses.Seagal's lines have been dubbed - poorly - and there's a noticeable difference in his voice depending on whether we can see his face or not, and almost everything he says when off camera sounds like it was read into a dictaphone on a lazy Sunday afternoon on his couch after a few too many doobies. Still, he's not the only one. MC Harvey, a former member of UK rap collective So Solid Crew, suffers the indignity of having his film debut dubbed entirely by an actor with a more masculine voice. After they meet towards the beginning of the film he shouts after Seagal's character "Don't forget about me Burns!" It's the last we see of him.But aside from one bad guy who inexplicably develops superhuman powers, some dreadful CGI and pointless green screen work, that's about the only amusement the film has to offer. The lead villain is so over the top it's outrageously hammy even by cheesy action movie standards. Delivering lines like "I have decided we must put an end to this professor" it's the kind of performance that would be laughed out of a Power Rangers audition. Having said that, he explains the plot so many times it's hard not to wish your manager were more like him for clarity in the workplace's sake.It plays out almost like a video game, with ten bosses being defeated one by one until the final showdown but I promise that's not as much fun as it sounds. That final showdown is a complete non-event and an embarrassment even to a film of this quality. It's painful - although not impossible - to watch, and even die-hard Seagal fans will struggle to find anything of worth in this tedious, derivative bore.

James Hitchcock This is a film which asks its audience to accept that Steven Seagal is "Yale's most distinguished academic". An interesting idea for a competition might be to ask people to try and come up with a more egregious example of miscasting than that one. John Wayne as a drag queen? Woody Allen as a heavyweight boxing champion? Arnold Schwarzenegger as a seven-stone weakling? How about Steven Seagal as the world's greatest actor? Actually, even asking the audience to accept Seagal as a moderately competent actor might be a bit much. Make no mistake, this is a bad film indeed. It only gets a second star because it never quite plumbs the awesome depths of badness achieved by Seagal's other 2003 film with director Michael Oblowitz, "The Foreigner". The seventeenth-century poet John Dryden, comparing his detested rival Thomas Shadwell with other minor literary figures of the day, wrote:-"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence But Shadwell never deviates into sense". A similar distinction applies here. Whereas "The Foreigner" never deviates into sense, or comes within a thousand miles of doing so, "Out for a Kill" does at least make pretence to some faint meaning. Seagal's character, Robert Burns, is Professor of Archaeology at Yale University. (Burns was originally a master thief specialising in stealing Chinese antiquities, and gained his degree while serving a prison sentence. I doubt if in real life Yale would have awarded a professorship to a man with this particular curriculum vitae, but the film is presumably set in a parallel universe where seats of learning are happy to offer academic chairs to convicted felons). While on a dig in a remote part of China, he unwittingly becomes embroiled with a gang of drug-runners and he is framed on false charges of narcotics smuggling and the murder of his assistant, who was shot dead by the gang. He is released from jail by a Chinese cop (named Tommy despite being female) and her American colleague who hope that, back in America, he will lead them to the criminal masterminds behind the drug-smuggling operation. Unfortunately, the villains have not finished with Burns, and his wife is killed by a bomb intended for him. He sets out to get revenge, and the film turns into the normal Seagal mixture of gunplay and martial-arts sequences. It was ironically appropriate that in "The Foreigner" Seagal played a character named Jonathan Cold, because his performance seemed to come straight from the deep freeze. Perhaps he and Oblowitz recognised this unfortunate irony, because in "Out for a Kill" his character has a surname suggestive of heat rather than coldness. His style of acting, however, remains as frozen as ever. Burns suffers a series of disasters to rival the Book of Job, but neither being imprisoned on false charges, nor the destruction of his home, nor the murder of his wife, can elicit any degree of emotional reaction from him. Not that the rest of the cast are any better. In "Under Siege" Seagal made the mistake of playing against a major Hollywood star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose acting skills served to underline his own deficiencies in that direction. At least he avoids that mistake here. The way in which the villains are played implies a racist view of the Chinese, little changed since the days of those old Fu Manchu movies. The main difference is that the criminal mastermind Wong Dai is played by a Chinese actor instead of Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee, but the impression is still given that the entire Chinese race, except for attractive women like Tommy, consists of fiendish Oriental villains. About all one can say in the film's defence is that some of the martial-arts sequences are reasonably well done. Overall, however, this is the sort of cheap, shoddy and racist actioner which I had hoped Hollywood had given up making years ago. 2/10