We should have known, from the moment that the camera panned up Steven Seagal's body from his black boots to his black jeans to a fringed buckskin Mohicans jacket, that this thriller about oil interests in Alaska would be a terrible abuse which gives a bad name to environmentalists everywhere. I bought this DVD in Bull Moose Records on a trip to Portsmouth, NH, and got really excited by the description on the back: Seagal directed, Michael Caine starred as the evil oil company honcho, and everything looked copacetic (despite the evidence that Joan Chen starred as the Queen of the Esquimeaux - once again, Hollywood casts an Asian person as an Inuit without a blush of shame). But no, it's an awful mess. The Inuit still use dog sleds and live in some sort of skin-covered huts. They take Seagal into these huts and minister to him with Mystical Medicine, then take him on a hallucinogenic trip into the Nature World where he discovers that his true Mission is to save the Earth from evil corporate types. (The Inuit couldn't do it, because they're primitives. Der!) Seagal's spirit animal is, of course, a bear. (Nobody's spirit animal is ever a lemming or a caterpillar or something.) Joan Chen in tow, he proceeds to tear up the offending oil rig and kill the smooth-faced, duplicitous Caine. Big shocker.
I would be less disappointed in this movie if we hadn't recently seen the new "Rambo," which Stallone directed and which also stars a large cast of non-Euro actors - in this case, Burmese and Thai. This "Rambo" is truly disturbing in a profoundly violent way. The evil insurgents who Rambo fights are terrorizing Burmese villages, and nobody from the outside will do anything about it. Except, of course, Rambo, who has been living in the country employed in gathering poisonous snakes for poisonous-snake fighting rings. He's convinced to intervene in the bad situation by a missionary group who really wants to help. He proceeds not to help much (it seems like the situation is pretty much FUBAR) but does manage to rescue at least some of the missionaries. Despite the fact that every time Rambo did something Rambo-esque we felt compelled to shout "RAMBO!" really loud, the movie was really something on a different level - unshrinkingly dark in its vision of the trouble that the people were living through. Definitive proof: Seagal is no Stallone.
We should have known, from the moment that the camera panned up Steven Seagal's body from his black boots to his black jeans to a fringed buckskin Mohicans jacket, that this thriller about oil interests in Alaska would be a terrible abuse which gives a bad name to environmentalists everywhere. I bought this DVD in Bull Moose Records on a trip to Portsmouth, NH, and got really excited by the description on the back: Seagal directed, Michael Caine starred as the evil oil company honcho, and everything looked copacetic (despite the evidence that Joan Chen starred as the Queen of the Esquimeaux - once again, Hollywood casts an Asian person as an Inuit without a blush of shame). But no, it's an awful mess. The Inuit still use dog sleds and live in some sort of skin-covered huts. They take Seagal into these huts and minister to him with Mystical Medicine, then take him on a hallucinogenic trip into the Nature World where he discovers that his true Mission is to save the Earth from evil corporate types. (The Inuit couldn't do it, because they're primitives. Der!) Seagal's spirit animal is, of course, a bear. (Nobody's spirit animal is ever a lemming or a caterpillar or something.) Joan Chen in tow, he proceeds to tear up the offending oil rig and kill the smooth-faced, duplicitous Caine. Big shocker.
I would be less disappointed in this movie if we hadn't recently seen the new "Rambo," which Stallone directed and which also stars a large cast of non-Euro actors - in this case, Burmese and Thai. This "Rambo" is truly disturbing in a profoundly violent way. The evil insurgents who Rambo fights are terrorizing Burmese villages, and nobody from the outside will do anything about it. Except, of course, Rambo, who has been living in the country employed in gathering poisonous snakes for poisonous-snake fighting rings. He's convinced to intervene in the bad situation by a missionary group who really wants to help. He proceeds not to help much (it seems like the situation is pretty much FUBAR) but does manage to rescue at least some of the missionaries. Despite the fact that every time Rambo did something Rambo-esque we felt compelled to shout "RAMBO!" really loud, the movie was really something on a different level - unshrinkingly dark in its vision of the trouble that the people were living through. Definitive proof: Seagal is no Stallone.
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