His participation makes me want to like the movie more than I do, but things keep getting in the way - things like the endless weapons-procuring montage, or the voodoo woman who runs afoul of the Jamaicans, or Joanna Pacula showing up in the movie for SOME REASON. The photography is good and the action is shot well, probably because the movie is directed by the great Dwight H. And if you're of the belief that he derives his power from his ponytail, it's never been longer than it is here. Seagal even gets off a couple of good one-liners ("Let's hope they weren't triplets."), which he isn't really known for - he's more of a silent badass. The high points of Marked for Death are really high: there's a fight in a department store that's amazing, the presence of Keith David - however wasted he is (and he is completely wasted) - automatically improves anything, and the movie has one of the very best bad guy deaths of ALL TIME. The shapeless, let's-go-here-and-do-this-thing-and-then-go-here-and-do-this-other-thing makes Marked for Death feel like a drag, but it's a big part of what makes Seagal's next movie, Out for Justice, arguably his best. The notion of sending Seagal to another country to fuck up foreign bad guys would be done to better effect in Into the Sun and Mercenary for Justice, which are lesser movies but which do a better job of making the locations matter. NONE of that informs the character or the events of the movie in any way, but Seagal would explore exactly this kind of character in the terrific DTDVD effort Pistol Whipped. I like Seagal's confession speech that opens the movie, where he admits to being a broken soul and doing terrible things in the line of duty. But the movie has a bunch of good ideas for an action movie that never really deliver - and which, interestingly enough, would be explored to greater effect in later Seagal efforts. In a way, Marked for Death finds Seagal kind of coasting - his movie persona had already been firmly established ( Above the Law announced him and Hard to Kill confirmed his status as a movie star) and he wouldn't start experimenting with it until Out for Justice, so he's pretty much spinning his wheels here.Ī lot of that wheel spinning works, especially for us action fans who know what we want and are happy to have it delivered effectively, nothing more. For that reason, I've seen it more than maybe any other Seagal movie, which is weird because there are a bunch that I like better. Marked for Death was the first and only Seagal movie I owned for a long time, back when I was still collecting VHS tapes and bought a previously viewed copy from my local video store (I had less than 10 movies at that point, and this was one of them). I don't know why I get out of bed anymore.) Once you throw in the Dark Territory subtitle, it ruins everything. Under Siege 2 kind of fucks things up, too, but I like to pretend the movie is called Under Siege, Too, so that I can say "Steven Seagal IS Under Siege, Too. (Side note: this rule doesn't apply to two movies in the Golden Age: Executive Decision, which isn't quite a Seagal movie even though he's in it, and The Glimmer Man, because I've seen that movie a couple of times but I can't remember whether or not Seagal is the Glimmer Man. Marked for Death comes from the Golden Age of Seagal, back when every one of his movie titles had an implicit "Steven Seagal IS" in front of them: "Steven Seagal IS Above the Law." "Steven Seagal IS Hard to Kill." "Steven Seagal IS Out for Justice." It's no coincidence that the Golden Age ends around Fire Down Below, because you can't say "Steven Seagal IS Fire Down Below." After shots are fired at his niece and his sister is assaulted, Hatcher has no choice but to take the fight to the Jamaicans on their home turf, led by the mysterious and legendary Screwface (Basil Wallace). He's not looking for trouble, but trouble finds him when an old buddy (the always great Keith David) points out that a gang of Jamaican drug dealers are basically taking over the city. Regretting his actions on the job and fed up with the futility of the drug war, Hatcher quits the force and returns home to Chicago to visit his sister and her daughter (played by a future scream queen Danielle Harris, who starred in The Last Boy Scout just one year later). Seagal plays John Hatcher, a DEA agent whose partner is killed during an attempted bust in Columbia. A closer look reveals the movie to be more of a NEAR success - lots of cool shit, some good ideas, but never coming together the way Seagal's best movies do. After nearly two decades of direct-to-DVD shlock, Marked for Death might as well be Avatar. It played in theaters and was released by an actual studio (Fox). In some ways it is, probably because it's one of his few efforts that feels like a real movie. Steven Seagal's third movie, 1990's Marked for Death, is often called one of the action star's best.
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