Cinematic Quarantine 3 (For Real This Time) - Out For Justice

It's time to break this piñata, with the first of what will be a Seagal Double Header. And trust me, this will be the sane entry of that double header.

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“The thing about Steven Seagal is that he clearly wants to be a great person, but he just doesn't know how.”

-El-P, Rapper, Producer, Steven Seagal Film Watcher

The longer you watch Steven Seagal, the more you realize his entire existence is based around the fact that someone, somewhere down the timeline, fell for the hype he was constructing around him. To understand how someone could believe a lumbering, self-important human walrus was the next dimension in Action Film Star, you have to understand the period of history that saw his rise to fame. This was right at the height of the golden age of action movies, when Schwarzenegger and Stallone were still on top, where the world was willing to believe that sheer physique alone equals ultimate badass. This was a time in the world where Black Belt Magazine ran articles hyping the fake techniques and faker stories of self-evident idiot charlatans like George Dillman and Frank Dux, while questioning the legitimacy of MMA as a “real” fighting style. This was also the late 80s and early 90s in America, and this is a time when common sense and critical thinking took a backseat to being wowed by people who weren’t really all that impressive, but were willing to claim they were, and be an aggro dickhead about it.

Steven Seagal is a marginal human being, functionally what it would look like if serial police impersonator Jeremy Dewitte was about 80lbs overweight and willing to throw hands, as long as the person he’s throwing them at is significantly smaller than him and not actually a threat. Like Jeremy Dewitte, he’s also a sexual predator who uses his projected stature and status as a means to facilitate his assaults. He’s basically some gross shit you’d use a curb to scrape off the bottom of your shoe, if the shit could clumsily ambulate itself around when necessary and was capable of speaking like what a white moron thinks a jazzman sounds like.

So why am I talking about him at all? Because fuck him, that’s why. After all he’s done, after all the “effort” he’s put into a career of rampant self-aggrandizement, the overwhelming body of work he’s left behind him in the film genre amounts to about 200 filmed hours of watching a perennially out of shape action star try to suck his own dick and fail. His attempts to hitch himself to brighter and more mobile stars all failed miserably, as his presence is overpoweringly and devastatingly awful-funny, a functional answer to the question “how much human shit can you add to a stew before it stops being food and starts being a biohazard?” How many Steven Segals do you need in a piece of filmed media, before it ceases being a movie, and starts being a joke? Just one, same as we ever needed.

The movies he’s in now can’t be describe as anything other than an ongoing series of scams, an attempt to sell an old collapsed house as premium real estate, or at least use his name to draw eyes to a product that wouldn’t otherwise have any interest. This is a common tactic in bad movie making, and he’s not the only one to see a payday from it. But it’s this ocean of fast-tracked and slapdash mediocrity that covers the seafloor foundation of his career, stuff that has basically been subsumed into the darkness of obscurity. It’s the sort of thing that might give people cause to think, “hey, I wonder if his earlier stuff was actually good?”

The answer is no. The longer answer is, ‘Under Siege is good, because the presence of a Higher Quality of Fucking Nuts manages to successfully cut his overpowering flavor of ass, but otherwise, no.’ Y’all want proof? Here’s Out for Justice, a film that exists, and you can watch.

[Cinematic Quarantine]

One - Get a Job, Pay Your Taxes, Be a Good Fucking Neighbor.

This movie opens with a quote from Arthur Miller, about the nature of how cities have cities within them, and the potential for multiple cultures to bloom within one, and sometimes clash. This movie tries to have something to do with this quote; it does not succeed at it very well.  Anyway now Steven Stegal’s gonna beat up a pimp.

[That’s the same scream twice. Did they not think we’d notice?]

Welcome to the formula of Steven Seagal: we witness jaded badass regard the world with his seething anger, getting a big ol eyeful of his personal view of the world and what his view of justice is: immediate, authoritarian and fatally violent when disrespected. It’s at this time I’d also like to point out that Seagal himself is a known spousal abuser, so, y’know.

Just wondering if he himself ever wound up eating glass as a consequence for that, or if that’s just something the Gambinos made him do, when Mr. Paragon of Virtue's real life mob ties laid hands managed to lay hands on him.

The plot involves the murder of narcotics detective Bobby Lupo, over the fact that Bobby was having sex with the local crack-powered mob associate Ritchie Madano. There’s neighborhood history between Bobby and Richie, as well as the improbably named Gino Felino, Bobby’s partner, played by Seagal, who is now by-default the man that’s going to now go kill Ritchie. Seriously, that’s how this plays out: Bobby gets shot by Richie who does it in broad daylight, causing the NYPD to show up and lock down the block, call Gino, who then functionally declares himself the one and only man on a more-or-less official Vigilante Action to his fellow police. And they all just go along with it. Even Jerry Orbach, who is in this fucking thing.

You ever think about the things we used to think were okay to cheer on in movies? Like, look at this cop here, literally walks up to give him a shoulderpat and be all “YEAH GET HIS ASS, MURDER HIM EXTRAJUDICIOUSLY.”

[“...just give me an unmarked and a shotgun.”]

I’m a prison abolitionist. Which is why I would advocate for a firing squad to deal with this man.

There should be a moment to point out that Gino has a wife and son in this movie, and they’re currently in the process of a divorce. This isn’t an important plot point, and these aren’t important characters, but they do turn up in one of this movie’s myriad action scenes, which is why it’s important to, just, y’know, make note of the one woman in this movie that’s not here to be abused or murdered.

There’s also this puppy, which Gino rescues from traffic in a scene that reads like it was written while Seagal was concussed. Seagal names the pooch Corragio, which means, in Italian, [Courage the Cowardly Dog intro]. Please take note, that it’s here that Seagal petitions God Himself for assistance in being violent. Because this is a Steven Seagal movie, God will oblige his most Holy of creations by the end.

Oh wait, that’s the Beastie Boys on this movie’s soundtrack. Seagal is using the Beasties as his entrance theme; never mind, God is obviously dead in this universe.

Two - He Fights Crime Like He Runs: Flaccidly

In record time, we’ve described the framework of this movie. I’ve already revealed the big mystery of the story, that Bobby was fucking Richie’s wife [cut in Kurt Angle mouthing the words HAVE SEX WITH YOUR WIFE in the background. Sure, we can add in some additional detail, about how Gino’s such a massive badass, he as a cop can go tell a mob boss to his face to, functionally, go fuck himself, and the boss is just ‘hey, alright, fair enough.’ Because this is one of those movies written by a person who fancies themselves upright and principled, but then has to go in and write a bit about how even the fucking Mafia has principles and is outraged over all this senseless violence. But don’t worry folks, the Mafia is still bad! It’s just that the cops have some bad guys on them too, like the Mafia has good guys-

[appropriate clip goes here]

It’s all shades of gray here in the real world of Steven Seagal, people. So get ready to cheer on this murderous vigilante cop who has pals in the mob, as he proceeds to assault basically anyone that gets in his way.

Case in point, with our first real action scene, this mild-sauce of a car chase that leads into a blade fight in an Italian butchery. Ritchie literally drives up and throws money at some rent-a-thugs, but Steven Seagal the Great White Shart and Apex Predator of Brooklyn instantly arrives on the scene to unleash flabby hell. Thrill as a pair of couches shaped like cars lurch around corners and struggle to make more than 100WHP despite their massive engines, reminding you of the how and why Detroit’s auto industry turned into a machine that only built worker poverty.

But this is just mediocre, you can find this in any boring action movie from this area. To get that distinct Seagal Flavor, we proceed indoors, to a fight that can be described as “Steven Seagal Mutilates Civilians in the Thrall of the Mafia.” See these guys? They’re mostly just workers. Some of these folks? They might be mob associates, but the old guys behind the counter? It’s obvious they’re being suborned into front work for the mob, look at the look of fear in their eyes when it comes time to cough up the weapons and ammo they’ve been holding.

So of course, what does Seagal do when he encounters this spread? Oh y’know, just some stuff you’d see in The Raid. Some light Evil Dead II things, y’know, no big deal. This won’t be the first time I point this out, but, this is our hero, folks. And just for good measure, he makes the old guy practically hit a rail off his own revolver- it weren’t enough to inflict a medieval injury on a delicatessen worker, he makes pops go eye to eye with a .38 instead of just stripping the weapon. You want to know why people like John Wick as a person, despite the fact that he’s an emotionally cracked assassin that’s addicted to violence? Because if he puts a gun to someone’s head, he shoots them as fast as they realize they’re downbore. He doesn’t traumatize them while swinging his dick, like a ponytailed hog bloated from cocaine and testosterone replacement.

Did you notice the missing element here? The part where it seemed like at any point, Seagal was in peril? Yeah, get used to that, that’s gonna be a recurring thing.

Like right here, this fight in the bar run by Ritchie’s little brother. You might be asking, what fight? Hang on, let me fast forward through some more dickswinging. Just… a little more, dickswinging… hang on… There. So this shit’s just terrible, a prime example of what it feels like when there’s no weight or gravity to the situation in a fight. Gino walked into a situation where he’s massively outnumbered and is openly provoking a fight with everyone he encounters. This is stupid, but it’s fine, because he’s highly confident he can beat everyone in the room in a one on one fight, which he does, because they fight him one on one, because on this Earth, goldfish walk among us on land, wearing the skins of human beings. So I don’t actually have to describe what goes on in this encounter in detail, or really any of the film’s other fight scenes. The spoiler is, Steven Seagal Wins, Flawless Victory.

So instead, I’ll just relate you folks a story from on the set of this film, of an event that supposedly occurred between Seagal and his stunt team. You see, Out for Justice featured stunt-coordination by one “Judo” Gene LeBell, an individual known for being a master of the grappling arts, one of the originators of competitive MMA, and a friend and training partner to Bruce Lee. If you look elsewhere in this movie, you can also see Gene’s pal and another friend of the departed Lee, Dan Inosanto, an escrima master and one of the first men to instruct the ways of Jeet Kune Do that wasn’t Lee himself. Now Seagal, who is himself a whole galaxy of On-Set attitude and behavior issues, is a man who’s known for taking liberties with stuntmen- it seems the only way Steven Seagal can get his fix of hitting people is when he can be assured they won’t hit them back. LeBell took issue with this, given that Gene LeBell is by all accounts a great man and doesn’t stand for bullshit in his gym. Seagal, in a moment where his want to self-aggrandize superceded his own sense of self preservation, boasted to LeBell that he was the best fighter on set, that his mastery of Aikido had made him immune to being choked out and taught him techniques to escape any hold. He challenged LeBell to just try and make him submit in a real match. LeBell, being a gentleman as well as a scholar, highly suggested that they not do this, but Seagal, a braggart and a fool, demanded it happen. So, they went to the mat, and Gene did what Gene does: he got Seagal’s back and sank in a blood choke, just to the degree that someone would do in sparring, the sort of pressure that’s unpleasant, but not actually cutting off the blood to the brain- a clear sign to someone smart and respectful of the rules of sparring to tap out. Seagal responded by repeatedly karate chopping LeBell in the groin, to which in response, LeBell applied actual pressure to his hold, forcibly sending Seagal to dreamland and causing him to soil himself, Bigstyle.

This is again, an alleged story. It’s also a story that a lot of people have seen play out in the gym before: the hotshot newcomer learns how little they actually know by the old bull. It’s why there’s credence to it. So I want you to just keep it in through fight sequences like this one. And this next one especially.

Three - Beating a Fat Man to Death

The role of Richie Madano is portrayed by William Forsythe, an individual who has more than enough acting talent to be working elsewhere. There’s a problem with him in this role, however: it’s that even though he’s definitely not a small-framed man, he’s also in really bad shape. Under no circumstances am I going to engage in bodyshaming, I’m simply going to say: here’s what a fat person who can beat some ass looks like, across a few notable examples.

[Butterbean; Aja Kong; Roy Nelson; Bull Nakano; basically any Defensive Lineman in all of gridiron football, take your pick; Ditto Sumo]

This is not the look of a dude who can put his weight behind his fist; this is the look of a dude who doesn’t intimidate me as much as concern me, in an empathetic way; this looks like a guy who might actually want to avoid exertion. But don’t mind that, this is also our villain, and it’d be fine if he was just supposed to be an out of control violence freak using his gun as a Turn Person Off remote. But this is a Steven Seagal movie, which means at the end, this guy, is going to fight this guy. Folks, this is not a fair fight. This is not even close to a fair fight. This is some cruel and unusual punishment, extrajudicial execution via blunt force trauma and exactly one corkscrew. Take that, Pinot Grigio, try putting that cork back in.

You see what I’m getting at here? This is a human being using the end of a weaker combatant’s life to flex and grow his own ego, the act of beating a fat man to death slowly to exert superior masculinity and resume total control of his Ultra Platinum Epsilon-Male Beast Mode Grind Time Lifestyle. And again, I say, this is our hero, folks: The guy Jason Voorheesing dudes who are most likely regretting not fucking off over to the shore for the weekend, instead of putting up with this unholy coked-up hybrid of Chris Farley and Big Show with a gun’s particular brand of esoteric bullshit.

[“GONNA NEEDA NEW GO-KART… SOMETHIN’ WIT SOME STOMP.”]

You see that, Seagal? This motherfucker’s brain isn’t working correctly, and you just stabbed it with a corkscrew. How’s that supposed to help him? I don’t think the brand of Justice that you’re Out For isn’t very reformative, not very reformative at all. In fact, I may venture to guess that you’re some kind of an asshole.

Four - I Get the Distinct Feeling This Guy’s an Asshole

There’s this principle in screenwriting, called the Save the Cat Moment, and it can be describe in brief as “a moment of relatable empathy or charity that adds a human dimension to a character.” If you have a moment in your script, where your hulking musclebeast alpha of a leading man goes out of his way to rescue an adorable cat from a tree, you’ve just added a dimension of warmth and relatability to a dude who also Eats Green Berets for Breakfast. Out for Justice attempts this, quite blatantly. Seagal doesn’t save a cat, he saves a puppy. Instead of humanizing him, it just further exposes what just what a pork-robot bastard-man this character is.

Steven Seagal is a baffling individual, a man whose outward performance is that of principled valuer of justice, but whose active pursuit of those values results in him committing what probably should have been a Felony Animal Cruelty via light armoured vehicle rap. He makes films about the evils of corrupt societies, while living in exile in the Russian Federation. Probably the quickest way I could sum up what this man considers ethical principles as portrayed on film can be found in The Glimmer Man, a film in which he supposedly portrays a principled pacifist who is returning to his fighting ways out of necessity, but who also keeps a razor-gimmicked credit card in his wallet. Excuse me, pardon? You’re a pacifist, but you keep this Surviving Edged Weapons shit handy?

[SURVIVING EDGED WEAPONS]

Pardon, excuse me?

But that’s one easily identifiable specimen as to what this man thinks is acceptable behavior for a protagonist who’s also got a sense of justice and principles. Out for Justice, however, is a complete fucking ecosystem of these specimens, a nightmare bacteriological soup of bad behavior that somehow, this hell-man thinks amounts to some kind of paragon material. Specimen such as:

• Assault with bodily harm to a subject in police custody.
• Murder via defenestration to a subject in police custody.
• This parking job.
• Discharging a firearm through the ceiling of a basement establishment.
  • Seriously even the shitheel gangsters point out he could have killed someone innocent extremely easily here.
• Victim blaming.
• Elder abuse.
• Victim blaming, again.
• Elder abuse, again.
• Mutilation of a civilian with a cleaver.
• Elder abuse with a firearm.
• Leaving an abandoned puppy loose in an unmarked police car during a vengeance run, without food or a bed.
• Whoreophobia.
• Literally gibbing a guy with a shotgun blast.
• The aforementioned execution via bullying.
• And whatever the fuck this accent is supposed to be.

Every adversary is a destructible object, while every woman is something to be shaken until she cooperates- this is a bully’s outlook. Everything that is neither of the two is an object that can be had and used to facilitate the ends of this big dumb human moose, a creature that’s as ornery as he is territorial and directionless. To be clear, this movie is pretty much literally Steven Seagal pulling down trauma and damage onto the people that love him, because of his overwhelming need to murder a big fat guy. This is our hero, of a film called Out for Justice: a complete and total asshole, shaped like this ponytailed construct of fleshy plasticine and cultural appropriation.

And speaking of which:

Five - GABAGOOL!

Steven Seagal plays an Italian American in this film, one of New York’s largest historical demographics. It’s worth pointing out that Seagal himself isn’t Italian. He claims people mistake him for Italian, which… okay, sure. But you’ve got him doing shit like this:

[Take your pick of Bad Italian Acting]

And it’s like fucking tooth pain.

And I get it, bro, I get it. Your heritage is a mixture of European, you’re a dude caught by the backswing of the White Supremacy. That same shit that gives you privileges in society has also robbed you of a greater cultural background- you don’t have culture or tradition, you just have Whiteness. Trust me, unless you like being a racist shitheel who takes credit for the current state of society based on the fact that you live with a lack of melanin and think that this somehow makes you some form of chinless unicorn, this is a huge fucking bummer. The want to have a tribe is a deep pain, and everywhere you find communities of people, you find people that want to fit in, but struggle to. This hurts in a hell of painful way.

But if you’ve got that hurt in you, you don’t fucking go and do this. Or this. OR THIS.

The reality is, this is the tip of the iceberg for this stenchclown. This is the face of a man who thinks he can play dressing horse for a number of different ethnicities, all of them which he is not. The man is not Black. The man is not Chinese. The man may speak Japanese, but he is not Japanese. Ironically, he does claim to have some Russian in him, but then he goes and pronounces the name Vladimir like this. And this.

[VLAD-ee-MEER POO-tyne??]

He’s also not First Nations, despite how hard he tries to force his ass into that seat. No. Just, no.

But here we go, here’s this dude speaking Italian, poorly, rubbing elbows all buddy-buddy with members of the mob and functionally behaving like a Wiseguy with a badge. I’m just going to point out that the original screenplay of this movie, entitled The Price of Our Blood, was rewritten entirely by Steven Seagal on the basis that original screenwriter John Flynn “didn’t understand Brooklyn.” It’s at this point I’ll bring up that Steven Seagal was born in Lansing, Michigan, and later moved to Fullerton, California when he was 5. Going beyond Out for Justice, it seems like the biggest event in his life that ever occurred in New York was getting called out for being the worst guest Saturday Night Live has ever had.

“He didn’t realize that you can’t tell someone they’re stupid on Wednesday and expect them to continue writing for you on Saturday.”

-Tim Meadows, Comedian, SNL Alumni and Writer

So if you want to know what’s informing this performance as a fiery, not-to-be-messed-with resident of an Italian hood in Brooklyn, it appears to be pure ego. In terms of Authenticity, the man’s a Jersey Shore Olive Garden. He takes folks’ backgrounds and makes them into a hideous coat he can stretch across his shoulders and drape his shabby form in. And once he’s properly dressed, he starts brutalizing people in just the same-old, same-old fashion. I’m not sure what he thinks he’s doing when he does this. Maybe it’s what respect looks like to him? I mean, if the coolest man in the world wants to wear your skin as a suit and murder people in it, that’s gotta mean something, right?

Right?

Six - In Conclusion: Fuck

Out for Justice was originally rated NC-17 for its violence, having a number of its more brutal scenes cut for international and video releases, only restored after coming to DVD. What was not restored to the DVD cut was the scenes that Steven Seagal himself omitted from the rewrite of the script, scenes that featured and further fleshed out the character of Richie Madano, who is otherwise nothing more than a crack-smoking violence cypher with a shitload of money to throw around and a small army of thugs willing possed up with him, despite looking like his heart’s about to violently explode at any minute. This is because Seagal cut those scenes himself in the rewriting, as he felt that William Forsythe would upstage his own performance.

Too bad, it did anyway. Because Seagal sucks that hard.

Instead, we find ourselves at the end of a bloody road, littered with blood, corpses, mutilated bystanders and traumatized victims. And this fucking loaf standing tall above him, while Gregg Allman sings a soulful blues-rock anthem about how Steven Seagal totally wreck you if you get in his way.

[Now this Bad Boy back in Brooklyn, with such a hunger in his eyes]

The hunger is for pork.

I actually had to check and make sure that it wasn’t Seagal himself singing this shit, because you can’t actually put it past him. Because this motherfucker has an album, for serious. It’s called Songs from the Crystal Cave, I shit you not. It’s a fucking sonic nightmare.

[hit em with it]

I think I’d rather listen to Fieldy’s Dreams.

But the fact of the matter is, we’ve hit the ending: the apartment of a pair of young women is turned into a charnel house, a cop and a mafia hitman walk off arm-in-arm smiling, and as a sweet little stinger, Seagal picks a fight with and destroys the nuts of an old man who threw the puppy out of his car earlier in the movie. Remember when Seagal prayed to God for assistance in finding this guy? Clearly, this is what God wanted. Because in the world of Steven Seagal, this is what victory looks like: innocent people slaughtered by an unhinged monster-man, paid back with a pile of dead and maimed run through a meatgrinder by a vengeance-fueled knuckle dragging cop, who is cheered on by women and children who adore him no matter what he does, even when it’s assault with bodily harm on a dude who looks like he’s pushing 50 and about a hundo pounds overweight. Why does his family go along with this? Did he tell them the story about this car? Are we gonna claim that the woman who was about to divorce this guy for being too fucked up intense, is now all aboard with this jackass deciding to throw hands at Coney Island? Getting into a fight at Coney Island is grounds for horrendous violence, not a reconciliation, at least in terms of everything I’ve learned about New York from media that’s actually accurate in its portrayal.

[WARR-I-ORRRS, COME OUT AND PLAY-EEE-AYYYY]

But it’s movies, and movies are a look into the minds and worlds of people that create them. And if this is the reflection of a heightened reality through the eyes of Steven Seagal, if this is at least part of how he sees the world-

[montage of misery]

-then I’d rather live in John Wick.