Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Leofwine_draca There's something charming about the simplicity of this film's plot: it consists of an impassive Seagal working his way through a gang of Chinese Tong, murdering them one by one until his job is complete. That's it. No hassles, no interruptions, no sub-plots; just straightforward, methodological killing the way we like it. The surprise is that we get to see Seagal do some of his old fashioned kicking and Aikido kung fu methods, even sword-fighting at one point; seeing as his last film TICKER saw him sitting in a seat for the entire film, watching him back in action is a real surprise – and a guilty pleasure… This film is cheap, of course. Every now and then a terrible visual effect will pop up to show you that. The dialogue is nothing to write home about and the locations look particularly cheap. The storyline is clichéd and ridiculous and even the title is cookie-cutter perfunctory. But somehow it all gels together and works for a change. Seagal is in the limelight again, his hair a little longer, his belly a little more rounded, but still kicking backside with the best of them. Watching him destroy Chinese villain after Chinese villain with his well-practised arm and neck-breakings is a pleasure long forgotten in his recent run of movies and it certainly delivers the action goods with almost non-stop fight scenes and death.Some filler is thrown in with a Mulder and Scully pair of cops but their importance is minimal. What counts is the strong-arm violence, the sleazy strip-joints and nude dancers, and most importantly Seagal kicking backside. Watch out for the hilarious decapitation finale and the crazed fight scene in which Seagal batters a barber who knows the monkey style and flies along the walls at breakneck speed! This kind of imagination has been sorely lacking in similar Seagal flicks recently which again makes it a nice surprise. Far from his best, but if he keeps making these films then he's definitely back on track.

Scarecrow-88 Chinese crime families from major cities all over the world are uniting to control the marketing of drugs, eliminating any competition(as we see in the opening regarding a massacre in a Bulgaria strip club). Steven Seagal stars as an archaeologist(!), Professor Robert Burns, a recipient of the prestigious Winthrope award for uncovering important Chinese artifacts. Burns gets caught up in the midst of an attempted drug smuggling operation with the Chinese crime family using his archaeological dig recovering Chinese relics at the China/Kazakhstan boarder as a front to traffic heroine in the centuries-old statuettes. His assistant killed by gunfire, Burns makes it to the boarder, but is arrested for his possible involvement in smuggling the drugs in his artifacts. Released, Burns has revenge on his mind, but when Wong Dai(Chooi Kheng-Beh)sends his men on an errand to kill Robert's wife, the scorned professor will surely wreak vengeance on all who took away everything he ever cared for. Working with Hong Kong DEA agent Tommi Ling(Michelle Goh), and her American partner Ed Grey(Corey Johnson), Burns will annihilate each member of Wong Dai's crime family, setting his sights for the ringleader, who is stationed in Paris.Globe-trotting action adventure vehicle for Seagal has his martial arts Buddhist archaeologist taking out Chinese druglords in Chinatown, Bulgaria, and Paris. Like other 2003 action flicks, Seagal is able to look good thanks to careful camera angles, editing, and stunt work. We all know he can no longer propel himself in the air or move across a room like a gazelle. Good use of slow motion allows Seagal to obliterate opponents in a manner that seems quite authentic. I will say that there's one sequence, concerning a heavy dependence of wire-fu where Seagal's adversary can twist and turn in mid air, not to mention crawl across walls, looks positively ridiculous, quite laughably staged. Like most of his action flicks in the 2000's, Seagal's one-man army can go wherever he pleases, leaving an alarming string of dead bodies, without anyone even attempting to investigate him. He can go to Bulgaria and Paris without a hitch, despite his house being bombed and wiping out a number of men in a New York City restaurant in front of witnesses. Where Seagal is at his best is when he has those fast hands moving, blocking punches, and landing blows that send his foes hurling in the air and through objects. There are plenty of guns firing and thugs for Seagal to vanquish, and his Robert Burns goes through the motions with relative ease. The members of the Chinese crime gang all have nicknames and specific writings on their arms which forms a riddle, for which Burns soon interprets at the end. Well, on the bright side, at least there isn't a kidnapped daughter Seagal must rescue this time.

ma-cortes The picture starts with a brooding phrase : 'All warfare is based on the art of deception'. Robert Burns(Steven Seagal) is a professor of archeology, happily married(Kata Dobo), making excavations in Eastern China. When he discovers the existence a Chinese mob using archaeological pieces for drugs smuggling, the Chinese authorities suspect on Burns and is taken prisoner. He gets the freedom and returns US looking for vengeance. Meanwhile a group of Chinese mobsters encounter in Paris, it's the beginning of a new era. As Sai Li controls shipment in the French heroin market; Tang Zhili controls entire N.Y. drug conglomerate; Yin Qunshi from Sofia controls Eastern European drug cartel; Libo controls Shangai drug exports; Fang Lee from Paris , aka the Barber, controls Paris drug cartel, known to hire unique assassins; Mr Chang controls London drug money. Like all great conglomerates around the world, Chinese families are merging. An united Tong is powerful enough to push other syndicates out of business and will come a day when the Chinese families control entire market. The mobsters take special care so that nothing and no one interferes with a historic event, it will be the most important business transaction in the history of the Chinese family. Robert Burns is helped by two Dea agents, Tommie Ling(Michelle Goh) and Ed Grey(Corey Johnson).Tammie Ling based in Hong Kong investigates narcotics and other related crimes, assigned to work with an American agent, they have been in six countries in international drug ring. Burns gets a books of addresses in code, an ancient Chinese system used by messengers to the emperor, on the arm of every Chinese Tong member is tattooed a symbol from the emperor's code. Decoded and getting the boss'emperor, Wong Dai(Chooi Beh). Then Robert vow revenge and seeks the location of Sai lo(Ping Tang) the man who killed his wife. Si-Lo is using an old building in a laundry of Paris. Si-Lo made one very big mistake, he touched the most sacred thing in Burns'life, killing his wife and Robert is forced to dig two graves.The film packs lots of noisy action, thrills and violence, but doesn't quite hang together. Wooden Seagal is efficient at dispatching the enemy, he kicks, punches, wags and uses blades against the nasties villains. The fight scenes are middling-choreographed and violent, flowing much blood . May be predictable , especially the graphic violence , but the action is fast though with no sense. This film belongs the Seagal's last period when he's doing low budget and direct to video films, such as 'Flight of fury, Mercenary of justice, Submerged, Belly of beast, Ticker', among others. The motion picture is badly directed by Michael Oblowitz who also directed him in 'Out for kill and The foreigner'.

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