Liberation Hall is a nice little boutique label that hasn’t
done a whole lot in the way of releases yet outside of the home video debut of
Paul Bartel’s unreleased film Shelf Life before moving onto The Buster Keaton Show from 1950 and the African concert film Soul to Soul featuring
Ike & Tina Turner, Santana and Wilson Pickett. Operating under the radar though securing
licensing with MVD Visual, it’s a nice little offbeat label that’s still
seemingly getting jump started.
But
before they got into doing the more niche archival releases of older films and
shows, they had some clunkers in their library, among them the Keoni Waxman
2009 straight-to-video Steven Seagal vehicle A Dangerous Man which we’ll
be looking at today. Waxman initially
joined forces with Seagal in 2009 for The Keeper and has since done
several collaborations with him and former wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. This one, released on Blu-ray for the first
time by Liberation Hall with a behind-the-scenes featurette and 2.0 sound,
looks and sounds competent enough but seems to pave the way for many of the
uglier shades of Seagal’s personality he would eventually become disgraced
for.
Shane Daniels (Steven Seagal) is an Arizonian ex-Special
Forces marine framed for a murder he didn’t commit and having done six years of
hard time before being released back into the wild again. Separated from his wife Holly (Aidan Dee) who
has long since moved on following his prison time, he whiles away his time
looking for liquor when he is accosted by two muggers whom he quickly
sadistically subdues before stealing their car and ending up in Seattle where
he witnesses a police shooting by two Chinese nationals.
The plot thickens when not only does he
intervene to rescue a Russian witness to the crime named Sergey (Jesse Hutch),
but after popping the trunk of the car of the Chinese national, he discovers a
female hostage inside with a bag full of cash.
Rescuing her until she regains consciousness, the woman named Tia (Marlaina
Mah) warns Shane not to turn her over to the police, citing corrupt collusion
with the Chinese nationals. It doesn’t
take long for an all-out war to erupt between Shane, Sergey’s Russian mobster
father Vlad (Ukrainian actor Vitaly Kravchenko) and the Chinese nationals while
a man simply known as The Colonel (Byron Mann) proves to be the greatest
unexpected threat to the operation.
Mean in a way that feels arrogant and cruel, leaning into
viciously violent subduing of stock trade bad guys that say more about Seagal’s
personality than the character he’s portraying, including but not limited to
barking orders at female characters like Tia or stabbing a mugger to death in
the face and throat with disassembled pistol parts, A Dangerous Man is pretty
rotten. Whereas some sort of window was
placed between the action star and the audience watching him in his earlier
works, he smashes it to smithereens here and proudly flaunts all of his ugly
characteristics.
Truthfully the only
characters in this saga I came away liking were Sergey and his Russian mob
father Vladimir which could for some lead into Seagal’s eventual transition
over to Russia completely. Shot and
edited with that distinctly 2000s energy, the film looks crisp enough but also
has that frame dropping associative with action scenes from that era. The 2.0 sound and original score by Michael Plowman
sounds like cheap synthesizer trash but it more or less gets the job done. On a technical level, the disc isn’t
necessarily bad, just the film itself that is.
While not unwatchable, the reasonless mean streak running
through it and overall straight-to-video 2000s cheapness of the thing begs the
question why a new fledgling boutique label would want to get into this
crap? Steven Seagal does indeed have
some decent actioners in his canon, Under Siege perhaps being his career
high in a film astutely directed by Andrew Davis with Tommy Lee Jones giving 110%
onscreen. By this point, however, his
better days are far behind him and we’re just watching a crusty old martial
artist still doing his thing on autopilot but without the filter that made his
Hollywood productions tolerable.
Really,
the whole stench around this film for me all comes back to that one scene with
the muggers. A bit like rooting for the infamous
curbside stomp in American History X, its an overly violent scene that
is played as a throwaway kill of a bad guy but lands as an unmasking of the
latent cruelty of Seagal he never really got to show people when he was still a
Hollywood player. Sure its just
disposable action movie trash but the sadism of the man and not the character
is on full naked display here.
--Andrew Kotwicki