Steven Seagal

Spring is here and I’m suffering from some serious Steven Seagal withdrawal. Doubt me? Please don’t because there was a point this past winter when it seemed every guy-oriented cable channel – Spike, USA, etc. – had some sort of Steven Seagal film or program on that day. Some even ran 24 hour Seagal marathons! (More on that later.) For a long time Seagal aficionado such as me, this was movie manna from action flick heaven.

See, I’ve been a fan of the lethal one since his auspicious debut in 1988’s Above The Law. How well I recall that opening day screening. It was a Friday night and I was in line for a midnight show at the Loews Orpheum II theater on 86th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. I was out with my then-paramour, and the line we were on snaked around the block. We were in the midst, to put it kindly, of the sort of rough & rowdy crowd usually found in a 3 a.m. showing in a Times Square grind house. She expressed her concern and inquired why we were seeing this movie starring this complete unknown Seagal. I responded that I didn’t know about Seagal but I was there for 2 important reasons: Pam Grier. Well, the larger-than-large thug behind me thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard and repeated it to each and every person behind us in the line who also laughed uproariously. As a result, my lady and I were assured by this rather immense fellow that we’d be safe in the theater no matter how bad the movie. (There’ll be much more about this incident in my upcoming book How To Win Friends And Gain Needed Physical Protection or The Art Of The Well-Placed Wisecrack.)

With that reassuring fact in mind my lady and I took our seats in the abbreviated orchestra section – five rows - in the front of the theater. Now, the Orpheum II had stadium seating and normally I like to sit at the very top row of the balcony to get the true panoramic view. But as I explained to my date, I felt considering the restless energy in the audience, the closer we were to the street-level exit, the safer we’d be. Judging by the number of physical confrontations during the coming attractions, my hunch proved to be a correct one. A number of individuals were tossed down the steps only to land a few feet from us. Then they would get up and slowly limp towards the exit door never to return. The movie started but the noise and fighting didn’t. At one point, a man – to my recollection, the only Caucasian in the theater stood up and demanded silence. He got it – for a second. Then he was pelted with sodas, candy bars, popcorn buckets and whatever else could be picked up and tossed from the Orpheum floor. Cowering, he ran out of the theater screaming in fright. Too bad for him. Had he managed to stick it out just a couple of minutes, he would have seen Steven Seagal accomplish what he could not.

Okay, here’s the scene. Seagal, a tough pony-tailed cop named Nico, has his gun trained on a number of bad guys on a Chicago street. He informs them if any of them moves, he’ll kill them. One of the bad guys, realizing they outnumber the bullets in Seagal’s gun brazenly tells him that he can’t kill them all then moves towards him. Seagal instantly shoots him in the heart – killing him – and challenges the others to meet the same fate. With that single gunshot, the audience in my movie house, gasped then went as silent as Sunday morning churchgoers. From then on, the silence was only broken whenever Seagal demonstrated his martial arts moves. First, we’d never seen a big man like him – he’s nearly six-five! – move so fast, so gracefully, so fluidly with his hands. Second – with the exception of Sonny Chiba – we’d never seen so many broken bones on screen. The result was wild cheers. There was even prolonged applause at the film’s end. As we left the theater, I caught the eye of the head thug I’d amused pre-screening. “That Em-effer’s serious!” he enthused. I had to agree. Seagal’s fierce fighting skills and his nonchalant soft-spoken presence had even made me forget my disappointment of Pam Grier’s rather small role as his partner.

His follow-up, Hard To Kill, made me even more of a true believer. Here he was police officer Mason Storm – still his best character name – who discovers a top elected official is corrupt. Unfortunately, so too is everybody in his unit. The result? His wife – Sharon Stone! – is killed and he’s shot and presumed dead as well. But he’s not! See, he’s been in a seven-year coma and the nurse taking care of him – his then real-life wife Kelly LeBrock – has fallen in love with him. (Proving once again, fellas, that conversational skills are overrated.) But the really bad cops have found out he’s still alive so it’s a really lucky thing he awakes from this deep slumber and with the aid of Nurse LeBrock, leaves the hospital, takes some herbs, does some acupuncture, runs a few laps and gets back into fighting shape. Now this is when the movie really takes off as Seagal kills everyone by every possible means including pool cues and a literal kick-in-the-ass delivered to former Renegade co-star Branscombe Richmond! Again, Seagal delivered another satisfying effort.

His next two films were far more uneven. Marked For Death had him as – surprise! – a cop fighting a Jamaican drug gang. The best part? After killing the ruthless ringleader, Seagal is surprised that the villain has reappeared. Turns out the gang was led by identical twins! So Seagal proceeds to break every - and I do mean every - bone in the bad guy’s body, gouge his eyes out then throw him down an elevator shaft where he’s impaled on a giant coil! Seagal’s response brought the house down: ‘Sure hope he wasn’t triplets.” Out For Justice cast Seagal as a Brooklyn cop – shocking, ain’t it! – trying to stop psycho William Forsythe who killed his partner from starting a mob war. Besides seeing of such future television stars like Jerry Orbach and Julianna Marguiles in small roles, the surprise of Out For Justice is the three – count ‘em – long expository-filled monologues Seagal gives himself before each action set piece. It’s like he wanted to show casting directors he could actually act. But as a boisterous brother at my screening profanely shouted at the screen, Seagal fans didn’t come to see him act, they came to see him kick considerable ass.

Fortunately, with his next film, Under Siege, he did. The film was notable in many ways. It was the first without a three word title; the first without his trademark pony tail; the first that he wasn’t a cop. Here he was Navy cook Casey Rybeck. Granted, he was a cook who was an ex-Navy seal but he still wasn’t a cop. Here, in what was basically Die Hard on a boat, Seagal not only battled terrorists but A-list actors like Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey – who, believe it or not, was A-list at the time – and more than held his own. Under Siege was a box-office blockbuster which propelled Seagal to the then top of the action-movie heap with Schwarzenegger and Stallone.

Then came the slow-but-steady descent to direct-to-videoville. He next starred in and directed On Deadly Ground an environmental action flick where he took on the oil companies as well as Michael Caine made up to look like an Elvis impersonator. Unfortunately, it was more deadly dull than anything else. Then came a series of flicks where Seagal’s waistline expanded while his moviegoing audience seemed to shrink. Some were underrated – Fire Down Below, The Glimmer Man and even the inevitable sequel Under Siege 2 or Die Hard on a train – and others like The Patriot were just bad. Even his fine extended cameo in Executive Decision – Die Hard on a plane - which starred Kurt Russell and Halle Berry didn’t get him much attention.

So Seagal – blessed with a devoted inner-city audience – took another career path. The pony-tailed one went hip-hop teaming with DMX in Exit Wounds and Ja Rule in Half Past Dead. Unfortunately for Seagal, the results on screen were as mixed as the box-office results. (It’s interesting to note that few white actors are as relaxed onscreen around performers of color as Seagal. Perhaps it’s because he brings his own brand of confident hipness and doesn’t deign to condescend to some sort of stereotypical White Negro slang.)

Next stop for Seagal was the made-for-video action market. He wasn’t the first to do so. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the for rental shelves were chockfull of flicks starring folk not-ready-for-theatrical-release-prime-time like Oliver Gruner, Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Lorenzo Lamas and Dolph Lundgren. In the dawn of the new millennium, these same shelves became the refuge of such fading action stars as Jean Claude Van Damme and Wesley Snipes. But no one made as many with such vim and vigor as Seagal. (Usually garbed, by the way, in the same ¾ leather coats.)

In Submerged, he was a mercenary fighting terrorists. In Flight Of Fury, he’s a fighter pilot fighting insurgents. In Urban Justice – with comedian Eddie Griffin – he was a former government agent who moves to the hood to get his son’s killer while in Shadow Man, he’s a former government agent trying to find who kidnapped his daughter. In Today You Die – featuring Treach from Naughty By Nature – he’s an ex-con thief seeking revenge. In Belly Of The Beast, he’s an archeologist fighting Asian gangs while in The Keeper – which is Taken meets The Bodyguard – he plays a Texas – what else? – bodyguard. You get the point. Not a Noel Coward farce among them. (Although Seagal was quite funny in The Onion Movie satirizing himself.)

Now there were some – dare I say – risky projects? In Driven To Kill, he’s a former Russian – replete with accent! - gangster-turned-novelist – yes, you read that right – who returns to New York City’s Brighton Beach to protect his daughter. And in Kill Switch – Seagal’s version of Seven which he wrote – he’s a southern-accented Louisiana homicide detective haunted by the memories of his twin brother’s murder. Now remember that accent because it comes in handy in his latest and perhaps greatest project.

See like a kung-fu Zelig, Seagal uses it throughout his recent reality show entitled Steven Seagal Lawman. Turns out that for the last twenty years, Seagal has been a reserve deputy chief in Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish. Lawman takes us inside his regular patrols to provide what is, in my ever-humble opinion, one of the greatest reality programs in the history of television.

C’mon, you’ve got to love a show where you actually get to see an undercover agent’s non-pixilated face! A show which has what I call Seagalvision where they zoom into his ever-watchful face with a whoosh sound effect then give the viewer a slow-motion POV of what Reserve Deputy Chief Seagal is seeing from his passenger side seat of the police SUV cruiser he’s patrolling in. A show where the people in the parish are consistently surprised to see him even though he’s been patrolling these streets for we've been told is two decades. A show where a suspected drug dealer calls him ‘Mr. Stallone.’ A show where he calls Van Damme ‘a gnat.’ A show where he actually shoots off the head of a match at a distance of several yards away. A show where he demonstrates his still-formidable hand speed by tossing fellow officers to the ground during training exercises. And I’m not even getting into his musical appearances with his band or his practicing of acupuncture on his police brethren. (Let’s see Van Damme try that!) I’ll just tell you Steven Seagal Lawman is riveting television Not only can I not wait for next season, I can’t wait for the DVD of this season! In the meantime, I’ll just have to make do with the next Seagal marathon on the tube where no doubt he’ll be fighting international gangsters or street thugs or crooked accountants or even vampires. What can I say? He's still a serious Em-effer.