Great Film overall

Fresh and Exciting

Better than most people think

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

CAUTION: Plot spoilers present.Esteemed archaeologist Robert Burns is shocked to discover that someone had been using the artefacts he had dug up to transport drugs. Panicking, he & his assistant make for the Chinese border but on the way there the assistant is killed by a stray bullet. Sent to jail, Burns is then released by the CIA as bait for the owner of the drugs – the Chinese mafia. Burns is reluctant to play along but when his wife is killed in a failed attempt on his life, Burns decides to single-handedly take on & defeat the Chinese mobsters.Ever since his 1988 debut in ABOVE THE LAW, Steven Seagal has been one of the 1990s' action icons – a master of the brutal martial art of Aikido & part-time police officer in real life. But during the late 1990s, his career started to decline. He briefly turned to DTV land but after a brief return to the big league, Seagal ended up stuck in DTV wasteland for the remainder of the decade.Before I get into the review for Out for a Kill, let me point out that I am not Seagal's biggest fan nor his harshest critic. He has made some decent films – the best being UNDER SIEGE – but he is not particularly good as an action hero. His brutal martial arts moves are so sadistic that they are a source of amusement for those who like brutal action (including myself) but Seagal has resulted in some real abominations – particularly the 1998 flop The Patriot. Having said that, his weakest pre-2003 films has been unfairly maligned – TICKER was a reasonable thriller if one goes into it with the right state of mind; HALF PAST DEAD was trashed by almost everyone but was entertaining in a dumb sort of way & THE FOREIGNER was average but not bad.Out for a Kill is perhaps one of the worst action films I have seen in quite some time. The film is the second pairing of Seagal & The Foreigner director Michael Oblowitz & has been almost a complete disaster. Judging by what I saw on screen, it seems likely that a lot of the dialogue has been replaced by ADR looping since most of the actors (namely Seagal) end up being obscured by odd camera angles while speaking (perhaps the original dialogue was changed for some reason) & the film's pacing borders on the cinematically schizophrenic. This has been done before on other films, but not to the destructive extent it has here.The film is beset by other problems as well. The plot is almost incomprehensible to understand & has clearly been put together in post. The acting is almost universally poor – chief villain Chooi Kheng Beh spends his role mainly sitting at a meeting room chair spouting stupid lines like "There will come a time when the Chinese (mafia) families will control the entire (drug) market" & lacks sufficient characterisation to be a real threat. The most disturbing part of the film is the poorly-done action scenes, with a couple of real turkeys like the fight between Seagal & a strange assassin who for some reason can climb on walls & keeps scratching his head as if he had a lice problem. The real prize moment of badness comes in the final confrontation where Seagal is stunned by a flashbang bomb & picks up a sword, walks to the window where he spots the villain running to his car & tosses the sword at him, decapitating him from a good ten feet away. I couldn't understand why the assassins all have tattoos revealing codes for the mob's safe but this is a minor problem in a film full of problems.Out for a Kill is only to be enjoyed by those who have been chemically enhanced (I mean drunk or stoned) or those who can survive sitting through a turkey without suffering from badness overload. The worst part of this film is that it was the beginning of a very long road to ruin for Seagal's post-millennial career.

I will admit it right now, I am not a huge fan of Steven Seagal. He was good once upon a time, but recently he has resorted to poorly acted, sloppily paced and straight-to-video-quality films; Out for a Kill is no exception. I am really sorry, but I do not know where to start pointing out the things that are wrong with this movie.Now don't get me wrong, there have been some good action films, and I do like the genre, but as an action film and a film in general, Out for a Kill ranks towards the bottom of the spectrum. So where do I begin with the criticisms? How about the plot? The plot is so predictable and lame, and it takes such a while to get going. Plus by the end of the film I was running out of fingers to count the number of plot holes there were in the movie. Not only that, some of the plot holes are so big, you can drive a delivery truck through them.Or how about the dialogue? Like the characters, the dialogue is filled to the brim with clichés, no sense of intelligence or wit. What about the direction? Nothing there as far as I could see. It wasn't innovative, it wasn't sensitive and it wasn't good. Instead it felt phoned-in and derivative, as if the director wasn't really interested in the film.How about the quality of the film? Well, I'll answer that right off, it was shoddy and slipshod. The camera work, scenery and visual set-ups were incredibly shoddy, with editing all over the place, and done with no care. Even the action sequences were sloppy and unexciting, and the choreography is... how should I say it, ham-fisted. And what was up with the ending? Really ropey and a real letdown.Even worse was the acting. Steven Seagal looks really unkempt here, and he gives another lazy performance, while Michelle Goh is cursed with some of the worst dialogue of the film and the rest of the supporting cast were pretty much playing themselves. Plus I felt indifferent to every single character, none of them moved or compelled me in any way. Any redeeming qualities? Well, the opening just passes muster, but everything else is very hard to take and is a complete mess. 1/10 Bethany Cox

The picture starts with a brooding phrase : 'All warfare is based on the art of deception'. Robert Burns(Steven Seagal) is a professor of archeology, happily married(Kata Dobo), making excavations in Eastern China. When he discovers the existence a Chinese mob using archaeological pieces for drugs smuggling, the Chinese authorities suspect on Burns and is taken prisoner. He gets the freedom and returns US looking for vengeance. Meanwhile a group of Chinese mobsters encounter in Paris, it's the beginning of a new era. As Sai Li controls shipment in the French heroin market; Tang Zhili controls entire N.Y. drug conglomerate; Yin Qunshi from Sofia controls Eastern European drug cartel; Libo controls Shangai drug exports; Fang Lee from Paris , aka the Barber, controls Paris drug cartel, known to hire unique assassins; Mr Chang controls London drug money. Like all great conglomerates around the world, Chinese families are merging. An united Tong is powerful enough to push other syndicates out of business and will come a day when the Chinese families control entire market. The mobsters take special care so that nothing and no one interferes with a historic event, it will be the most important business transaction in the history of the Chinese family. Robert Burns is helped by two Dea agents, Tommie Ling(Michelle Goh) and Ed Grey(Corey Johnson).Tammie Ling based in Hong Kong investigates narcotics and other related crimes, assigned to work with an American agent, they have been in six countries in international drug ring. Burns gets a books of addresses in code, an ancient Chinese system used by messengers to the emperor, on the arm of every Chinese Tong member is tattooed a symbol from the emperor's code. Decoded and getting the boss'emperor, Wong Dai(Chooi Beh). Then Robert vow revenge and seeks the location of Sai lo(Ping Tang) the man who killed his wife. Si-Lo is using an old building in a laundry of Paris. Si-Lo made one very big mistake, he touched the most sacred thing in Burns'life, killing his wife and Robert is forced to dig two graves.The film packs lots of noisy action, thrills and violence, but doesn't quite hang together. Wooden Seagal is efficient at dispatching the enemy, he kicks, punches, wags and uses blades against the nasties villains. The fight scenes are middling-choreographed and violent, flowing much blood . May be predictable , especially the graphic violence , but the action is fast though with no sense. This film belongs the Seagal's last period when he's doing low budget and direct to video films, such as 'Flight of fury, Mercenary of justice, Submerged, Belly of beast, Ticker', among others. The motion picture is badly directed by Michael Oblowitz who also directed him in 'Out for kill and The foreigner'.

This is a film which asks its audience to accept that Steven Seagal is "Yale's most distinguished academic". An interesting idea for a competition might be to ask people to try and come up with a more egregious example of miscasting than that one. John Wayne as a drag queen? Woody Allen as a heavyweight boxing champion? Arnold Schwarzenegger as a seven-stone weakling? How about Steven Seagal as the world's greatest actor? Actually, even asking the audience to accept Seagal as a moderately competent actor might be a bit much. Make no mistake, this is a bad film indeed. It only gets a second star because it never quite plumbs the awesome depths of badness achieved by Seagal's other 2003 film with director Michael Oblowitz, "The Foreigner". The seventeenth-century poet John Dryden, comparing his detested rival Thomas Shadwell with other minor literary figures of the day, wrote:-"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence But Shadwell never deviates into sense". A similar distinction applies here. Whereas "The Foreigner" never deviates into sense, or comes within a thousand miles of doing so, "Out for a Kill" does at least make pretence to some faint meaning. Seagal's character, Robert Burns, is Professor of Archaeology at Yale University. (Burns was originally a master thief specialising in stealing Chinese antiquities, and gained his degree while serving a prison sentence. I doubt if in real life Yale would have awarded a professorship to a man with this particular curriculum vitae, but the film is presumably set in a parallel universe where seats of learning are happy to offer academic chairs to convicted felons). While on a dig in a remote part of China, he unwittingly becomes embroiled with a gang of drug-runners and he is framed on false charges of narcotics smuggling and the murder of his assistant, who was shot dead by the gang. He is released from jail by a Chinese cop (named Tommy despite being female) and her American colleague who hope that, back in America, he will lead them to the criminal masterminds behind the drug-smuggling operation. Unfortunately, the villains have not finished with Burns, and his wife is killed by a bomb intended for him. He sets out to get revenge, and the film turns into the normal Seagal mixture of gunplay and martial-arts sequences. It was ironically appropriate that in "The Foreigner" Seagal played a character named Jonathan Cold, because his performance seemed to come straight from the deep freeze. Perhaps he and Oblowitz recognised this unfortunate irony, because in "Out for a Kill" his character has a surname suggestive of heat rather than coldness. His style of acting, however, remains as frozen as ever. Burns suffers a series of disasters to rival the Book of Job, but neither being imprisoned on false charges, nor the destruction of his home, nor the murder of his wife, can elicit any degree of emotional reaction from him. Not that the rest of the cast are any better. In "Under Siege" Seagal made the mistake of playing against a major Hollywood star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose acting skills served to underline his own deficiencies in that direction. At least he avoids that mistake here. The way in which the villains are played implies a racist view of the Chinese, little changed since the days of those old Fu Manchu movies. The main difference is that the criminal mastermind Wong Dai is played by a Chinese actor instead of Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee, but the impression is still given that the entire Chinese race, except for attractive women like Tommy, consists of fiendish Oriental villains. About all one can say in the film's defence is that some of the martial-arts sequences are reasonably well done. Overall, however, this is the sort of cheap, shoddy and racist actioner which I had hoped Hollywood had given up making years ago. 2/10