"Anybody seen RITCHIE!?"
The crown jewel of Steven Seagal's blood drenched portfolio, Out for Justice is an experience in the absurd and every second is pure glory. Featuring an endless chase sequence, visceral violence, and a hilarious script, this is a quintessential example of two wolves battling for supremacy. On one end of the spectrum, director John Flynn is desperately trying to make a serious hard boiled revenge story. On the other hand, Segal's usual antics, bolstered by an absolutely insane ensemble, derails any sense of depth in favor of an almost comic book approach to policing. The result is a glorious disaster.
The plot is straight forward. A bad guy kills Seagal's partner, and now the Beret clad detective, the only officer on the force with the knowledge of the "neighborhood", is out to settle the score. Let the hunt begin.
From its opening Arthur Miller quote, to the inclusion of side plot lines such as debts of family and loyalty, Out for Justice reaches for the sky, only for its wings to melt in a furious symphony of bullets, cue balls, and blood. Everyone around Seagal's super human Gino seems to understand the strange dichotomy of the film. William Forsythe is absolutely menacing as a drug addled killer, while Jo Champa, Jerry Orbach, Gina Gershon, and Sal Richards loom in orbit of the two principals. Richards in particular is the most charming part, a gangster stuck in the middle of his life's code of honor and his loyalty to the neighborhood, an intriguing concept that is never given time to breath.
Seagal on the other hand plays it smooth, using his (admittedly) diminished chops to attempt to bring a form of gravity, but the carnival ride has already started long beforehand, accentuated by an opening sequence in which Seagal tosses a red velvet shoes wearing pimp through a windshield prior to his name freeze framed across said windshield, setting the tone for the ride you've agreed to take.
Ric Waite's muted cinematography is washed out and dead, like the city its players inhabit, but this is livened by a hip hop filled soundtrack and larger than life characters that exist within a few precious blocks. The action scenes are well choreographed and are weaved into the narrative with painful precision, allowing them to seem like everyday occurrences in the film's madcap take on the urban jungle.
The attempts at building a mythology are fascinating. From the way Seagal interacts with his neighborhood, the mafia code of justice (how they interact with the legendary Gino), and the way the "neighborhood" itself is a character, complete with its own No Sleep Til Brooklyn theme music. The most important part of this mythology however, is Seagal's Gino, from whom criminals constantly flee and pay other criminals to stand in his wake as fodder, meeting their ends at all of the Seagal hallmark arm breaking maneuvers and clever uses of unconventional weaponry, including a memorable sequence with a corkscrew.
One of the most endearing aspects is that the appearance of the neighborhood mafia, signaled by its own theme music, can be clocked with an egg timer. 90 seconds after every major action piece, they show up like the Keystone Corleone's and it is pure magic, rivaled only by a pool hall apocalypse, featuring a random pool stick wielding martial artist (of course) and the repetitive shoving of a character into a phone booth that culminates in one of the most vicious uses of a pool ball ever seen on film.
The end result is a unique entry into Segal's oeuvre, but ultimately it is reflective of a lost time in the early 90's when action movies were transitioning from macho-fueled carnal houses to contemplative stories of people on the edge. In the wake of the unspeakable police brutality that would spark the LA riots, Out for Justice feels like a cartoonish approach to subject matter that continues to divide America to this day. Still, despite the completely insane approach, this is a film that deserves a chance, if only for the pure spectacle of its existence.
--Kyle
Jonathan