.co.uk

Steven Seagal is off to take the Senator to the bank -- the blood bank -- *DUM DUM DUMDUMDUM*. Yes, after hired assassins left in him in a coma for seven years, he's now fighting fit and ready to avenge the death of his family.

Viewers, you better be drunk and/or free from snobbery, otherwise you needn't bother watching this film: As far as cheesy-movies-that-entertain go, Hard To Kill is in the Premier Division, chasing the league championship with the likes of Commando, Cobra and Road House; as far as decent movies actually go, however, it's definitely non-league -- it's bad, in all semantics of the word.

Seagal's character is police officer Mason Storm (how's that for an action hero name?), who ends up getting shot by the mob after uncovering some dirty information about the city's Senator (William Sadler, Die Hard 2). Caught up in the mess, also, are his family: His wife is killed after a few shotgun blasts, and his son only just manages to escape after being chased down by the baddies.

The Senator (being the idiot that he is) thinks that the threat of Storm has been taken care of, only to discover seven years later that he has been secretly kept alive by a coma-ward nurse and Storm's former partner (Frederick Coffin). Storm eventually wakes up and begins training in a bid to finish what he first started.

You can't possibly take all the shit in Hard To Kill seriously, but there a few moments that are good for laughs. Seagal, for one, is a middle-aged man with a greasy ponytail who runs like some demented Duracell Bunny when he's chasing down the bad guys; and, as an actor, he's bloody awful, with his facial expression never seeming to change.

There's a particular scene, for example, where we see him doing his routine Aikido training and his new love interest (Kelly LeBrock, who is equally as bad at acting) enters the room, makes up an excuse that she was just passing, and asks if he would like a flower. Seagal accepts, ends up fucking her, and afterwards is seen sitting around, contemplating, as he twiddles his wedding ring around his finger and attempts to look sad in the face.

With the aid of a flashback, we're given the hint that Seagal's character supposedly misses his dead wife around this point, and is feeling so guilty about jousting this other bird that we're supposed to feel sorry for him. With the aid of a beer, I found myself laughing hysterically within the company of myself as I watched this scene, wondering how on Earth the scriptwriters could ever expect us to take Seagal -- a man of incredibly limited acting ability -- and his torment anything but seriously.

Other ridiculous-but-not-intending-to-be-funny moments come when Seagal is seen unleashing his martial art skills on the enemy. Rather than routinely shooting someone, Seagal gets down on his knees and taunts people, telling them to "Come get some!" Needless to say, he ends up victorious, but some of the moves he uses to overcome the antagonists are pretty cool: He snaps limbs, stabs necks with pool cues and even jams a shotgun through someone's teeth at one point. The action scenes aren't half bad, to be fair.

With a title like Hard To Kill you can pretty much guess how invisible Steven Seagal appears to be here, and what to expect. Even Schwarzenegger and Stallone take a few knocks from time to time, but the Aikido star never seems to have any competition here (it's a sharp contrast to his roles as a clairvoyant and a healer in real life).

Seagal's action movies can be entertaining in spurts, but there's other times that I just wish someone would seriously give him a beating to test his true nature as a character. The good guys always win, but it's the battle that takes 'em there that we love.

Hard To Kill is pretty routine stuff for Seagal. If you fancy venturing beneath the action heavyweights for an evening into b-movie territory, then you might get some enjoyment out of it. Just don't take it too seriously (it's Steven Seagal, would you anyway?)

(C) Andy Carrington, 2009.