Another fantastically mediocre effort by Seagal has made it’s way onto my TV – Shadowman!
I’m not officially a Seagal hater, he has some decent Aikido movements in his films and does an awesome job of playing the same character in every movie – the unbeatable ex KGM / CIA / Superman out to mess shit up!
It’s just a cheap and guilty pleasure!
This film however, was less of a pleasure than some of his other more pumped out efforts releases.
Seagal plays Jack, who is a rich as all hell business man who used to work for the CIA. He has a daughter who is 8 to a woman who died some years ago. During a trip he arrives at an airport in Bucharest and his daughter is kidnapped and his father in law’s car bombed with him (his father in law) in it… …apparently (queue sinister eyes).
Jack then heads on out to get his daughter back, tracking down different parties involved in her kidnapping which seems to revolve around a deadly virus that some bad people are trying to transport.
Along the way he meets a woman who was involved. She turns to the good side of the force and gets to the point where she almost throws herself at Jack. Meanwhile Seagal puts on his quiet tough guy persona and keeps kickin’ ass across the board.
Quite possibly the blandest performance ever by Seagal!
Jack is a pretty standard type cast kind of character, and Seagal has really just run with it.
We see him at the beginning of the film as a Tai Chi instructor beating up his students (like all good teachers), but that’s about all we hear about his martial arts background – just a quick ‘setup mention’ to get the audience knowing he’s the king of all things hand to hand.
After that, the action kicks off and he’s on the chase, all within the first fifteen minutes! He simply shows up from place to place and kicks people asses, plain and simple. I had trouble not getting up and waistline time surfing the net during this film.
The Martial Arts
As usual Seagal offers his onscreen performance which is very soft and and passive with a natural but mixed style with some unimpressive strikes. Apart from the strikes, his style is not too bad to watch and is fairly unique to Seagal.
The fighting is edited together pretty choppy though, and the fights are all over pretty quickly.
Overall it’s a pretty bland move in every apsect, and seems to be made more or less to just ‘pay the bills’ – little effort can be sensed in this film.
