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Cinematic Quarantine 4: Today You Die - Part Two, of The Seagal Duology
🕑 Added 2021-08-21 21:56:25 +0000 UTCThis is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, one that actually gave me a headache trying to use my mind to comprehend it like a normal person would comprehend a normal movie. This one right here? This is is a rare strain.
[TODAY YOU DIE hangs onscreen, slowly fading with the narration.]
This film to me was once little more than a half-forgotten blurb on the pay-per-view preview channel- hey, remember those? I’m pretty sure I remember reading, or maybe seeing a review of this thing, that called it one of the worst things Steven Seagal had ever committed to film. This was my frame of mind when I idly clicked on its trailer, archived on youtube, as I browsed for exploitably terrible moments from his latter-day career to tell the story of what he’s been up to lately in the Out for Justice video.
What I found in that trailer melted my brain. I had expectations in my mind of what I might see, but this trailer so exceeded them while also falling so comically, cosmically short. This was a new dimension of suck that almost immediately threw me into a state of the kind of laughter that caused me physical pain and caused my partner to ask, “are you alright?” All I could do was point to the screen and try to enunciate the words ‘bad fat man’, and I don’t think she understood. But could you blame me? What the fuck even is this? This doesn’t look real. This looks like something Jeff Gerstmann would make up as a joke on an Unprofessional Friday where they were playing FMV games; this is what Duelin’ Firemen would look like if it starred Steven Seagal, a complete calvinball mess of disconnected ideas, carried by the lethargic electrical currents of one man’s idiot neurons to something that probably deserved to see release on a 3DO video CD, yet instead found its way direct-to-DVD in 2005.
It needs to be said that though he produced this movie, with others, Steven Seagal did not write this motion picture experience. This came as a shock to me watching it, as perhaps more than any Seagal movie yet made to date, Today You Die serves as an elaborate autoblow device to fellate the ego of this aggro pile of leather scraps, Gorilla Glue and hair. Don’t believe me? Try this shit on for size.
[WALK LIKE A BLACK MAN, BREATHE LIKE A KILLER]
Then you consider that the other producers actually sued Seagal, for doing distinctly Seagal things on set, like doing rewrites himself without permission, and compare it with the completely unfocused and sustained bafflement of the story itself, and the picture becomes clear: this is what happens when a man bullies a film into being a vanity project on someone else’s dollar.
Because this is the horrifying truth of what this movie is: Today You Die isn’t merely any bad movie, but a transcendently bad experience that actually baby elephant walks the World’s Most Mediocre Pachyderm in Seagal, into the type of cinematic space that’s normally inhabited by one Neil Breen. Finally, we get to see what Steven Seagal truly is when he’s at his most unfettered and egotistical, starring at the center of a film where a major plot point is just, that he’s the best at everything, up to and including being a Black Man.
Up to and including doing magic.
I bet you didn’t think you’d see the Rare Magic Seagal, did you? Buckle in folks, reality’s going to crash and restart during this one.
[Cinematic Quarantine]
One - A Series of Scenes That Abut One Another, Forming a Plot as a Result
You know you’re in for a treat when the production company logos don’t even look real. What even the fuck is this?
[show some of this movie’s editing]
My question stands, what even the fuck is this? I’m not doing this, I’m not yet goofing on this footage, I’m just letting it stand as is, so you can breathe in the kind of mid-00s edgy presentation you can expect from the rest of the film, a style that kinda gives you an idea of what it would look like if Hype Williams or McG directed something without a budget, and after sustaining a severe concussion.
And the lady sits up bolt awake in bed, and Jesus Christ Steven Seagal was just waiting, staring. That’s how our protagonist is going to start out this plot, waiting for a distressed woman to wake into his arms, so he can give us insight into the nature of dreams. Please, no. Don’t do this film, we don’t need this energy going out into the universe…
[prattle]
Get used to the Steven Seagal slugvoice rattling off uninspired and unrequested wisdom and philosophy like that, he’s kind of like what it would sound like if you had an oversensitive smoke detector that alerted you to smoke with whispery drunken slurring, and you decided to cook bacon in your small apartment.
Oh also, shit might get magical-
[possible dream guidance]
-so just maybe get ready to go limp, in case we wreck on that particular hard corner.
Okay, shit, never mind, now we’re in a Zucker Brothers Movie, we’re in Hot Shots Parte Tres: Saddam’s Revenge. Except this doesn’t seem to be a spoof… this is… oh good lord, he’s being completely serious, this is a completely serious film.
[Seagal says “Yeah.”]
So this graceless meat homunculus, we’re told through the assumption of the filmmaking, is a stealthy master thief who can get into anyplace, anywhere, at any time, and he’s got like super cool gadgets to do some hacking shit and what not, but also, we learn that he’s a good guy, because of the super duper natural sounding dialogue the put us in to inform us, this is no ordinary penthouse, but a DRUGS PENTHOUSE.
[the appropriate line]
Yet despite being an expert safecracker, the man’s got a 1 assigned to his Perception score, as somehow despite his skill at skullduggery, he’s crept up on by a man who looks like he should be accompanied by the sound of radio static. Now I don’t shame people on their looks, you are the way you are, and you, yes you, deserve a look that respects the way you look. The way this man looks right now? I’m about to slice him up like oven roasted turkey. Because this man is the visual expression of what living life with an anxiety disorder feels like. This man could be anthropomorphized heartburn. I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t seen folks that rock this sort of look, it’s just that you typically see them in the vicinity of Racoon City. This man is the ghoul form of 2 Cold Scorpio.
He’s also the resident drug dealer of the drugs penthouse, who does that dumb idiot bad guy thing, where he decides to capture and trash talk the person who is currently breaking and entering their shit, causing Steven Seagal to reveal how much of a non-character he is by inverting his shotgun and putting him out of our misery. Then just for good measure he tops 2 Dead Scorpio’s bodyguard as well, who for some reason was just standing on hand without his gun drawn. Nice job, idiot.
And then Steven Seagal just sorta walks out, and the remaining henchmen of the drug dealer who may have been, himself, made of cocaine… just sorta start emerging from cover to be killed. Sorta gotta wonder what that guy who was in cover was thinking, when he could just lean out and light Seagal up, because he’s just walking in the open, oh well, get rocked. And then swordfights, because of course, and Seagal does a sweet anime slash and…
...and then we’re in a car, on a remote highway, talking about dreams again. It is in this moment, of listening to this wooden delivery of dialogue that leaps off the page like a fart in an elevator escapes out the door, the movie confirms what its intent is: that it’s not here to entertain you, but depict Steven Seagal as the greatest, most wisened and utterly kickass hero to ever walk the Earth, like if Achilles used modern tactics, and also was a black man. It doesn’t care how transparently it will disrespect your time to make you understand this fact, because just as soon as it teases you that this film might actually be the energetic sort of dumb, it sinks in the clutch and gears back down to first, to have another chat about the significance of dreams, prime the pump for potential magical horseshit, establish that Seagal’s character, “Harlan,” is an actual Robin Hood who’s somehow getting out of the game by going to Vegas to work for the hinkiest motherfucker alive- that dude looks like Sinister Minister, what the fuck? -and that all of this is amounting to big internal emotion for Seagal.
Then it shows you how much it’s going to disrespect your intelligence, by piefacing you with this:
[The Going Out of Business Children’s Hospital. The actual sign they put in the movie.]
It was at that moment that I was overcome by the feeling that this movie grabbed me by the ear, held it open, and started pouring hot tea in my ear, while asking me if I liked the taste. This was someone attempting something they felt represented a real feeling that real people had, and revealing themselves to be an alien wearing a disguise that doesn’t fit properly. This was a movie that understood that tea is a heated beverage that humans consume, that has a certain degree of ceremony to its service. Which it then forced into the wrong orifice of my head. Dead alien giveaway. This movie was made by aliens.
There’s just got to be a better way of phrasing that sign. GET YOUR CHILD’S HEALTHCARE ELSEWHERE, WE RAN OUT.
Two - Our Hero, The Active Threat
[Max, our crime boss/Satan figure]
I would get the feeling that even in the real world would look at this individual right here as the wrong sort of person to get a fresh, legitimate start in life. This man is Obviously the Devil, you might as well just put a big bowl of red apples in the shot with him, and maybe a trophy taken from a mountain goat strategically positioned behind his head. At the very least, he can’t be trusted, as the man immediately leers at Seagal’s wifegirlfriend, before these two stranger-danger henchman motherfuckers amble in through the door and call them trailer trash with them still in earshot.
[the clip in question]
Listen I’m not one to stand up for Seagal, but if you’re going to insult the man, don’t call him trailer trash when you yourself look like the aftermath of a Mr. Lahey drinking binge that washed up in the drunk tank. [Mr. Lahey stumbling meme]
Then it’s on to Seagal’s new totally legit armoured car driving job, which is so legit, wifegirlfriend calls Seagal to tell him how the dreams are telling her his boss is evil. We get this moment that’s almost self aware:
[“Why are you whispering?”]
Because he can’t stop, that’s literally how he talks. And of course the job isn’t legit, look at this shady shitheel he gets paired with on his first day- why do all these henchmen look like they got busted at one of those Free Boat police stings, back in the 90s? Oh no, look out, he’s got a suppressed pistol, bad shit’s going down, that means it’s time for avant garde freezeframes in our action sequence. This is the sort of thing that would make Elvis shoot a television.
So now evil Uncle Leo is holding Seagal at gunpoint through the window of the armoured truck, telling him to drive or die. This is one of those situations where shit would most likely be terrifying and hard to escape in real life, but given that this is an action movie, and you can write and choreograph things, y’know, especially when you’ve established a hypercompetent hero, you’d figure they might have Seagal do something clever to try and escape. Y’know, maybe use his aikido to lever the guy’s arm and break it against the window frame, maybe drive really fast, then take a hard turn or break hard to take advantage that this guy’s not wearing a seatbelt and riding in the back of a hard, steel box he can slam against the inside of. But no, Seagal complies. To an unhealthy degree.
And as he does, we get these cutaways to Max and his shadow partner, which is ratcheting up the tension: Max needs that money, because someone wants this money. He needs that money, Max needs that money? Do you get it yet? Is the nail hammered home yet? Good, because I forgot all about this shit the first time I watched this thing, because I was really high.
[HERBS CAN BE VERY POWERFUL]
So you can see this is the scene where they dumped the overwhelming majority of the budget, this chase between an armored truck and a sea of outdated 70s cop cars. You know what you can bet on when you see old Crown Vics or Caprices playing the role of police cruisers in a contemporary-to-its-time action movie? That’s right, they’re wrecking those cars. And they wreck the shit out of these cars, no expense was spared in their demolition, they get the full blown gasoline fireball treatment. So does this old civilian pickup and camper, which Seagal just decides to pull a Pro Gamer Move into the back of, in order to lose the cops.
Those campers just died. You’re laughing, and a group of campers just died.
Seagal just starts intentionally dumpstering cop cars into rolling infernos, making him and actual in-plot cop killer. I’m not joking about this, these people are dead even in the storyline. It’s a bold goddamned choice to make your hero an active threat to life and limb in an all hours tourist paradise, and I’m pretty sure I disagree strongly with it.
So despite taking a direct hit through the bullet-resistant windshield from a 40mm grenade, something that would turn the cab compartment into shrapnel hell, Seagal and Evil Uncle Leo are alive, and pulled over at the side of the road. Somehow, Seagal has unloaded and hidden millions of dollars from the blasted out truck, despite being wounded and exhausted, and having to carry out Evil Uncle Leo, who is somehow even worse off despite being in the armoured truck compartment. This man typed IDDQD into the console I swear.
Then he collapses by the side of the road and waits for the cops to come pick him up, specifically for the moment where they call for backup and speak the street and cross-street into the radio, before he passes out. This would form the basis for the rest of his career’s method in filmmaking: he just positions himself as still and comfortable as possible, and waits for his moment to deliver a scripted response.
Then he passes out.
Three - Dumb Baby Jail
I sure hope you like extended sequences of Steven Seagal being a cool guy under pressure, because this scene lingers like death by exposure. I mostly feel bad for this woman, because she’s playing such a nonentity of a character, she might as well be called Detective Cop Lady. This shit is not going to advance her resume or win her a good payday, and for what? To get yelled at, pawed by or both by this man-sized dirty fingernail? Nothing but sympathy for a performance that didn’t deserve any further effort beyond the woodpile she delivered.
Then Supernintendo Chalmers busts in on the interrogation, and is immediately the most corrupt person in the world. So we can just tie off that potential for surprise with a big, thick rubber band made out of this scenery-chewing fey delivery:
[Supernintendo Chalmers]
So it’s off to Dumb Baby Jail with Seagal, which at first is established by this real-world desert edifice of absolute fucking terror, but then quickly becomes a series of cheap sets. It’s in this prison setting that we see the next stage of Seagal’s baroque ego-fluffery. So did you know, Bill O’Reilly has published an actual work of fiction? It’s about as bad as you’d expect, basically an outlet for a malignant personality to reframe his worst qualities as heroic virtues. The kicker about it, is that O’Reilly couldn’t just have it one way, to make his author stand-in either the hypercompetent hero or villain, but both. Bill O’Reilly had to both be the world’s most high-profile serial killer, and also the hardboiled cop that was on his trail. Now you’re saying, Doc, that’s a fairly similar monument to egotism cast out of art available for public consumption, but why am I bringing it up here? Because it’s such a cliche among narcissistic assholes that they can’t just be the best at being good, they also need to proclaim that they’re also the best at being bad, hard as hell, the most unfuckwithable. Bill O’Reilly is a fragile-egoed and privileged member of the 1% whose existence is threatened by advertiser opinion, let alone him perpetrating a high-profile crime- he is extremely fuckwithable. Steven Seagal trained and taught aikido in Japan, where his presence is said to have left very little impact; he has been included on multiple contemporary MMA teams, though it’s said it was for the same meme-psychout effect Muhammed Ali was using when he brought chi-manipulation doofus George Dilman into his fight camp for a cup of coffee. His known capacity to be a wide-dispersion sex pest and bully has all but obliterated any high profile work opportunities from his horizon, rendering his only appreciable presence in recent good movie history as being the butt of a joke. He is, by all points, extremely fuckwithable- just ask Gene LeBell. But beyond that, we also know that Seagal plays for Team Cop so hard, he was a reserve sheriff’s deputy, before his current, ahem, self-imposed exile. This man plays for Team Cop so hard, he was involved in an armoured ram being driven into the wrong house on a failed cockfighting raid, killing an innocent family’s dog, which is the sort of thing that sounds like an Onion headline, but is real, and I just feel bad for that dog and their people, man.
The point is, Steven Seagal is as authoritarian as it comes, just so long as he’s not the individual fleeing the law. He visibly shows his support for authority at every chance, he wants to make it sure and known that he salutes the flag, no matter what configuration the red, white and blue comes in. He just also wants it known, that if he ever went to prison, for, y’know, hypothetical crimes? He’d be the absolute coolest motherfucker on the block, an instant legend. And certainly not someone who’d need to be calling for protective custody the second he passes through the front gates.
So people want the money he hid, and they go ahead and try to get that information by stabbing it out of him, like sensible individuals. This motherfucker is all man and a yard wide, yet he did not come equipped with a tactical mindset- this is a man that would benefit from a manager in his corner, Bobby the Brain could work wonders with this man.
After Seagal makes summary work of his attackers- dude, get up, this is prison, you’ve gotta try to kill this guy harder, you don’t want a coward’s rep -we meet Naughty by Nature’s Treach, who plays the role of… sigh… ‘Ice Kool.’
[Long Pause]
[ican’tleaaaaave without mybuddysuperfly]
Treach, who I’m gonna call Treach, because fuck that, is a man with connections. How and why is never really established on a level that puts him as feeling like a real person that’s grounded in reality, but rather an extension of a character who was bullet-pointed out on a napkin, that had ‘gangsta’ as the topmost point. Like if I was going to start offering legitimate criticism to this movie, rather than telling it its shirt looks like a dishrag, it’s that so many people talk in this movie without actually saying anything. So much of it’s this graceless blather that’s trying to establish that there’s a friendly rapport between Seagal and Treach, but as they talk, we learn nothing about their backstories, only that they’re extremely cool, extremely hard, just so fucking gangsta. Treach’s character would seem more believably gang affiliated if this movie actually had a sense of place, that his gang could lay territory claim to a piece of, like an actual gang.
But on the other hand, look! Steven Seagal gets to be a part of the cool guy crowd when the black guy says the word he’s not allowed to, that’s awesome.
[the clip in question]
I don’t think that guard’s skull is fully solidified. Dude I think that might have been a giant aged toddler Steven Seagal just knocked out. They shouldn’t have let Billy Quizboy become a corrections officer. My man Dave Coulier’s going to be waking up on the back of the cart in Skyrim a few hours later. Cut. It. Out.
This is the tipoff of a really dumb prison break plan that basically has no reason for any of the people doing of the heavy lifting to be participating in the effort, and a conveniently flown-in sheriff’s helicopter. Steven Seagal gets in on this plan, because he’s got money and Treach wants a piece of it, presumably to pay for what he’s going to owe for this elaborate-ass plan. Which of course goes off without a hitch, despite what this music on the soundtrack is trying to tell you, listen to this shit! This is the escape sequence from a Resident Evil game, this is a Mako Reactor about to explode. But whatever, they just fly away without a problem. This guy shoots at them, despite this being a sheriff’s department chopper and I don’t know that they’d just light that thing up on suspicion alone, but whatever, I dunno.
Tension is pointless, action is inaction, peace is imprisonment, and this is a movie.
Four - Legions of the Ineffective
You would imagine that with our protagonists having escaped from prison, their reapprehension by authorities would be a major plot point. It isn’t. Detective Cop Lady and Supernintendo Chalmers will persist in the script, but they’re ultimately meaningless, probably because Seagal chopped down on their roles in the film. I’m not just saying that, there's kind of a whole... legal thing, over how much Seagal threw his weight around on this project and rewrote people's parts. We'll get to that later.
No they’re functionally impotent texture, human gristle in a 3 dollar steak of a film. Impotent being the operative term, because after a prison escape like that, where everything goes off with a hitch, there’s absolutely nothing that can threaten our protagonist, Steven Seagal. I mean, seriously, Detective Lady Cop is clearly on Seagal's side, and what kind of threat is this middle-aged Milhouse Van Houten to Steven Seagal?
Anyway, as soon as they’re out from inside, they just land the chopper at this resource cache that Seagal has set up in the desert. The pilot’s still there with them as they get guns and cars from this stash barn out in the desert, and you think that might be planting seeds that he’s some distrustful motherfucker that’s coming back to haunt them. Nope, don’t worry about him, he’s gone after this shot, he’s basically a spooky ghost that got caught in the frameup. And of course, Seagal’s just got this safehouse, also in the Desert, where his wifegirlfriend shows up without a hitch. This is how the film is gonna go from this point. His wifegirlfriend has another prescient dream; Treach shows up and takes him to a homeboy with a small arsenal of Goldeneye and Resident Evil pickups in his backroom, which is where we get this line in its natural habitat:
[WALK LIKE A BLACK MAN]
Who’s his first opponent? It’s this old motherfucker, who looks like he’s in the early stages of liver cirrhosis via functioning alcoholism. Again, you notice a trend here: I don’t know about you, but I look at these toughs, these supposed criminal heavies, I should not be thinking to myself “if I were to fight that guy, I’d have to try really hard to to hurt him without actually killing him, because I’m pretty sure a good forearm shiver might stop his heart.” In a scene where our hero decides to get really heroically homophobic and predjudiced against mentally ill people, he manages to briefly threaten this Uncle Who Doesn’t Get Invited to Thanksgiving Any More, who instantly gives up what Seagal is looking for, the details of a meeting between bosses, then tries to pull his own gun, before Seagal shoots him in the groin, to death. And then he incinerates him with an action movie cliche.
[a not cool guy who does not look at the explosion]
The world is a series of bowling pins for this giant spitpolished and sweatstained rock to knock over, then try to style on in the aftermath. It’s the equivalent of watching a grown man trying to flex on an eight year old, after swatting away his first attempt at a three pointer. It’s sort of like watching someone get full on themselves and their personal skill at a videogame, as they’re in the middle of doing the introductory tutorial.
Case in point, we’re into the part of the tutorial where the game teaches you that you can play one enemy faction against the other, to capitalize on their battle. Which is why Treach just happens to have the personal number of the local Triad boss, who move on Seagal’s word to attack their old rivals, who they ripped off or something or other.
[Seagal blathering into a feature phone]
Because in this world, people operate without impulse control, and are highly persuaded by phonecalls from unidentified men with sludgy voices. And thus, enter the Triad, in their parade of hilariously ersatz Fast and Furious cars, which they dismount fully strapped and ready for a fight and OH HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, NO.
[I AM DA SHADOW WARRIAH]
[I LIKE BEEG WEAPONS]
[I am sitting here… GETTING STEEF]
Look at these Grand Theft Auto 3 Triads. These poor fuckers who were probably told on call to dress like a prime-time police procedural, that was trying to introduce old people to the idea that there’s organized crime in places that aren’t America. This is what it would look like if the people who made Outback Steakhouse opened a chain of crooked noodle stands.
So yeah, look, it’s that guy, remember that guy? I don’t but the movie apparently does, and he’s the one Seagal wants. He’s the guy who led the supposed raid on the Triad property, or whatever, and in it, we learn two things about our gangland underworld: one, is that this guy’s name is ‘T-Bag’; two, the Triad gang is called ‘The Dragons’.
[Iron Shiek: FAAAAACKIN BULLLLLLLSHIIIIIIT!]
Yeah fuck those Dragons, fuck ‘em up. Yeah, hooray, it’s a big action scene, one where there’s effectively no stakes and no tension, it’s just two sides you don’t care about blowing each other away, because Steven Seagal made a phonecall. That would be his contribution to this action sequence, that and assaulting this rude crime dad in the aftermath. At his very word, two criminal factions, one previously unknown and completely unrelated to the plot, have annihilated each other, because Steven Segal made a phonecall.
So then we get to watch our hero assault an older version of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys and put his head in a vice until he says a Hail Mary, because that’s a cool thing to have a hero do. Then Treach shows up and delivers this badass line:
[I DON’T LEAVE WITNESSES. bang]
How do you manage to make a revenge movie feel like it’s treading water, even as the people the heroes are getting revenge on keep getting killed? It’s because they aren’t anyone, you don’t know their relationship to the protagonists, you don’t see them as anyone who’s actually wronged them, let alone an apparent threat to them. They’re just a series of stacked up playing cards in the shape of an enemy, that get blown over when the winds pick up slightly. If you’re looking for tension in this film, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe it’s under the table vice was mounted to, and Rude Crime Dad is down there looking for it too. Oh wait, he's dead.
Five - Escape from Seagalworld
It’s by the hour marker of this movie that you realize you’re sitting in a cage in goddamned Alcatraz, that by looking at the progress bar and seeing that 30 minutes staring back at you, you’re reminded of the awful truth, that the restraint and monotony of being locked into this system of repetitious abuse is making time stretch and loop into a mobius strip: the clock ticks, but nothing moves forward, so 30 minutes might as well be 30 years. We are in this for a long haul that’s nonetheless backing up traffic on an express route. End movie, you bastard, you total fucker, end!
Alas, no, we’re going to continue to commit to this charade, that Today You Die has a deeper plot beyond Steven Seagal is The Greatest Man to Ever Live. Namely, it’s the idea that Max, the guy who looks like Satan, is dead, but also still somehow manipulating things behind the scenes. That plot point, and the fact that Seagal’s wifegirlfriend is having psychic dreams, is where we get the magical flavor in that movie, plus one scene I’m hiding up my sleeve, because seriously, it’s… it’s majestic. It just needs to sit and be appreciated on its own, just wait folks.
But of course, Max isn’t dead, and that’s what Seagal is betting on with this chain of revenge through Max’s associates. This is all intel-gathering, on top of being X-ing names off of a list. But then Detective Cop Lady shows up and suggests that Supernintendo Chalmers is corrupt, which he is, fucking obviously, and we realize that this is all just a bunch of horseshit song and dance padding to detract from the fact that anyone watching this that isn’t a fucking macro-scale ameobea has figured out the twist: that Max the Satan Boss and Supernintendo Chalmers are in cahoots. Does the film proceed to this conclusion with any sort of grace? No, instead, we’re going to go assault the next nonthreatening member of this characterless criminal conspiracy. Enjoy this music that sounds like it comes from a McBain movie on the Simpsons.
[MCBAIIIIIIIN]
It isn’t enough that the next crime boss that Seagal’s going after looks like a slimline version of Frank from Murphy Brown, and is about as threatening as a tackling dummy. No no, it’s that his head bodyguard is played by fucking Randy “The Natural” Coture, one of the legends of the UFC and mixed martial arts in general. This man is as legitimate a hand-to-hand killer as there comes in real life, one of the greatest to ever sling hands in fingerless gloves. So of course, this movie’s going to deprive us of a fight between this bonafide legend, and the legend in his own mind Seagal, who deletes him with a single uninspired motion. You want to talk dickwaggle? There it is: Steven Seagal just one-shotted Randy Coture in a movie. This is the single most brutal dosage of Unnatural Male Enhancement as I’ve ever seen a hack star pop on screen, folks. This is Bluechew for fat men with cluster-B personality disorders.
So instead, we get Steven Seagal’s stand-in interrupting what I can only describe as a Henchman Party, a party for henchmen only. Hey you want to see something funny? Imma dub in a Yoshi sound, every time there’s a clip in this martial arts action scene, where martial arts film star Steven Seagal’s face and head is cropped out of the shot.
I hope that hideous jacket got a credit as a stunt performer. It’s putting in serious work on this piece of shit.
Oh and then Seagal gets another shot in on Coture on the way out. Look how careful he is not to make contact. He knows whether or not he will see tomorrow depends on his ability to not cause Randy Coture to test him.
Anyway Thin Frank sets up a meeting with Max the Satan Boss, in his doom fortress situated in a warehouse somewhere out in the country. Alright, fine, we get it, Devil Shit, Max has got it, he’s into it bigstyle. He’s also playing the Satan Piano, provoking Seagal to get into some real pretentious shit:
[real pretentious shit]
It would at this moment seem as though we were headed toward any sort of major conflict, with some degree of tension. You’d be wrong. See, even face to face with the Devil, Steven Seagal stays cool calm and collected, and none shall challenge this great and holy champion. Not even this legend among men, the One known only as:
[BARTHOLOMEW. In Full.]
That put me into a state of frantic scream laughter, one that I could only really alleviate by sharing it with the world at large. What I didn’t choose to include in that original clip, were these two motherfuckers who immediately follow. WHO ARE THEY? Why are they so fucking armed to the teeth, look at that guy, he’s got two MP5s, TWO. They look like they’re the sort of vampire hunters that turn up when you commit too many Masquerade Violations. And of course they’re not actually wearing body armour, just trenchcoats, so Seagal just effortlessly slots them, as well as any further viewer interest in treating him as a serious name in action movies.
Max the Satan Boss makes his great escape, but if you think there’s some tension to be found there, don’t worry. See, the film took its time to show that Steven Seagal and Treach laid a shitload of explosives around the perimeter, including this Goldeneye remote mine on this helicopter. So just as he gets some altitude, bang. Seagal Wins, Flawless Victory.
[Earth Explodes. Fatality.]
Fucking Cyrax Mains.
Six - Every Medal of Honor (Even the Magic Ones)
The final 15 minutes of this movie is an attempt to close off loose ends with severely laboured breathing, a series of everything we’ve seen so far coming to a head, like bacon fat congealing in a mason jar. Your every preconceived notion of how poor this final encounter goes will be fulfilled, up to and including Supernintendo Chalmers being a smug pseudointellectual prick in a situation where there’d be literally no reason for these guys not to explode him and Detective Cop Lady like blood sausage via automatic gunfire. There’s even a lazy and completely meaningless title drop in the midst of it all, because fuck you, you moron, this’ll make your stupid grape-sized brain go click and make you happy, you complete and utter idiot, eat shit.
So instead, we’ll rewind to an important point I skipped over, when it came up in the plot. See immediately after this meet between Detective Lady Cop and Supernintendo Chalmers, Seagal’s wifegirlfriend has another psychic dream, and this time it makes her certain that Max is pure evil, and something beyond this Earth.
[“He’s pure evil, something beyond this Earth!”]
It then that she notices something on the floor:
[IT’S A PROTECTION DIAGRAM]
Okay so first of all, it’s a placemat. Second of all… okay, so… yeah. Steven Seagal just did magic. In this crime action movie, where he also spent a significant time being gritty behind bars, Steven Seagal also did a magic spell. It doesn’t matter if this is a real-ass supernatural setting or if it’s just all fun background dressing to real world crime, the fact remains, the character that is one of our two ties to the supernatural just responded to surprise and perhaps even fright to an act of ritual spiritualism to enact protection from evil forces, performed by Steven Fucking Seagal.
We’ve done it folks, we have arrived. We have found The Rare Magic Seagal. In doing so, we have crossed a dread Rubicon, like the narrator in a story of eldritch horror describing the paradigm shift in their perception of reality, that finally broke their sanity. We are the party at the end of the classic game Chrono Trigger, finally grasping that the cosmic monster that has been consuming our planet from the inside out, was nothing more than the larval form of something much worse. Witness, as he emerges from a cocoon of arrogance and celluloid: This creature, known as Black Tanktop Seagal.
There’s a term gaining traction in bad movie circles, called The Black Tanktop Movies. A level beyond the simple, mere mortal Vanity Project, movies that can qualify as Black Tanktop push past the level of front-and-center ego-forward production that you can find in their less intense and more common contemporaries, and instead choose to push the boundaries of belief in their attempt to assert that their unlikely star is instead one of the greatest human beings alive. Generally considered among the funniest bad movies you can find, Black Tanktop Movies are domain of people like Neil Breen, John DeHart, and Shunyee Bee, people who make movies where they’re the star, and you will know how multi-talented they are by the end. Black Tanktop Movies are essentially a higher dollar version of self-insertion fanfiction where characters either exist to fawn over the author’s character, or be blown away by them in conflicts. They’re also even more ludicrous, because unlike self-insertion fanfiction, you can see who these people are, because they’re just… right there. Shunyee Bee is the greatest martial artist alive today, the true successor to Bruce Lee. John DeHart is a country-western dispenser of justice, who’s also a sex machine. And Neil Breen? Neil Breen is the greatest intelligent being to exist at this space-time axis in our multiverse, a metahuman entity so powerful, it can only tan and wilt the crude matter attempting to contain it, as he frees people from their PTSD. Neil Breen has been awarded Every Medal of Honor. He’s the greatest hacker to ever live, and also a future-dimensional cyber-Christ who has destroyed over 300 million evil people- In Human Terms, He’s Killed them All. He’s omni-attractive to all women, but especially those he has a childhood connection to, via their experiences on A Magical Day. He’s also one of the greatest assassins to ever live, and capable of destroying major cities at a whim, which is why nobody would dare try to kill him, or even run him off the road while he tries to eat canned tuna while driving. He knows everything, and that’s more than the government knows, except how to help Jim out of This One. Neil Breen can disappear at will.
[The Force Shield claims another victim]
It’s now with that in perspective, and locking the pieces together of our pulsating and hideous puzzle, that we realize we’ve assembled the image of Steven Seagal in Black Tanktop form, a film in which every box is ticked, ironically except for the Black Tanktop itself. Considering how easily you can find that article of clothing in the man’s filmography, though? Might as well tick the box anyway.
So do we have omnitalented? Consider how this movie introduces Seagal: a man executing some ninja wirework into a drugs penthouse, which he then uses some sort of cryptographic lockbreaker gadget and safecracking to get at the money within. When confronted as an intruder, he summarily executes his assailant with his own weapon, and terminates the man’s second before he can even pull. In the ensuing escape, he does this samurai horseshit. He’s super persuasive and streetwise, he’s like this awesome driver that’s capable of these sick maneuvers, he’s got bombs and shit all that stuff, it counts. Tick the box.
But what about intelligent, how well is he respected for his mind, how much does he know? The answer is, like Neil Breen, everything, [and that’s more than the government knows.] He is a 12th level intellect capable of penetrating the source wall of Epsilon Male True Selfcore Refineset, who moves men like chess pieces from the passenger side of a car with cushy seats. Bow to his mastery of underworld strategy, of snitching one side against another, and hoping the guy you’re looking for gets away from the ensuing deathmatch and you can catch him before he boards an airplane out of there. You don’t understand the level this man is on, you lack the capability to rotate that many 3D objects in your mind to spin the number of mental plates Steven Seagal is onto. Tick the box.
Is he attractive to women in the space of the movie? Yes, and I’m not going into it in further detail, because like hell if any of us need that further psychic damage. Tick the box.
Does the world Steven Seagal inhabit break down into two kinds of people, those who adore him and those who live in hateful fear of him? The answer is a definitive yes, for this is a world in which two men who look like they’ve been ejected from an Old Country Buffet instinctually react to his presence by puffing themselves and posturing to maintain their position in the pecking order. Law enforcement’s response to this man who led a fatal chase through the Vegas Strip, is to either implicitly believe his story, or see him as one of the greatest threats to his continued existence in the world. Members of a criminal underworld give up their boss while wetting themselves rather than get roughed up by this guy. And of course, how could we forget how he
[WALK LIKE A BLACK MAN, BREATHE LIKE A KILLER]
Tick the box, this movie is suffocating my brain.
The previous boxes ticked can be attributed to things you as boilerplate in more common vanity films, but past this point is the realm of the Black Tanktop. We’re starting to get into the really weird ones, the too specific ones, the ones that most people think only occur in the films of the man who more or less gave name to the genre, in Neil Breen. Does Steven Seagal have esoteric knowledge, that he discusses at length with a love interest character? Tick the box. Is the love interest noticeably younger than Steven Seagal? Tick the box. Do other characters loudly proclaim how extraordinary Steven Seagal is? Tick the box. Is it difficult to actually discern what the protagonist does, aside from be the Best At Everything? Tick the Box. Does obvious homefill take the place of the trappings of high-end technology and luxurious finery? [hey look, broken computer monitors, where have I seen those before?] Tick the Box. Are there even extended establishing shots of Las Vegas? Tick the box. DOES STEVEN SEAGAL DO FUCKING MAGIC?
Tick the box.
The part about this, that’s really uncanny? The main way this movie isn’t a Black Tanktop Movie, is that it’s not actually a real vanity project, as Seagal himself didn’t fund it. This movie was made on other peoples’ bank, the people with the fake looking production logos. But Seagal did what Seagal does, which is be a gargantuan asshole with big elbows, bulling his way into script changes, probably cutting down other people’s parts, and just generally being a roadblock to what was originally intended by the filmmakers. There was actual litigation over this, and it’s probably one of those cases of “everyone sues everyone else and everyone lost money.” Because it’s not like this bomb made money in the first place, but I also can’t fault them for bring lawyers into it, because whatever they paid for? It certainly wasn’t this, this monument to the vanity of an astonishingly base and awful individual, bent and twisted into shape from its original form as an action movie: a film in which the Black Tanktop is in your mind, and Steven Seagal is the way, the light and the truth. Tick the box.
Seven - Local Multiple-Murderer Does Good by Community
Today You Die’s plot can be summarized simply: A hypercompetent Robin Hood thief decides to go straight by working for an incredibly evil-looking criminal, whose first job transporting millions of dollars turns into a guns-to-heads heist almost immediately, gets revenge on the people who sent him to prison over the incident, while also recovering the money from his stash.
If that plot seemed much different than the recap, then it stands as testament to how utterly fucking incoherent it is in trying to stick to its own structure, or even why it’s doing that structure in the first place. Like hell if I’m going to write a better version of this movie, but all I’m saying is, this should have been a narrative where everyone was after Seagal, over where he hid the money. As it stood, he had no reason to go on his revenge mission, he could have just gone at got the money at any point- the movie tries to insist he can’t remember where he stashed it, but if that’s the case, it wasn’t very well acted if so, I mostly just read that excuse as sarcasm from Seagal.
But that recap of the plot also skips out on the part where Seagal killed multiple people during a car chase on the Vegas Strip, one that Seagal tries to claim were some sort of casualties of war that were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like this camper he deliberately rams and explodes. There’s also the fact that his escape from prison, for again, murder, made use of a prison riot as cover. I don’t know if folks realize, but those are events that tend to end peoples lives, or at least, severely fuck up the existence of people who are already living in a concrete Hell. So that’s probably a few mangled or dead inmates and CO’s on Seagal’s hands. This is before this man decides carpet bombing is required to settle up the score with his old employers, as he proceeds to splatter death across Vegas like a tornado hitting an above ground cemetery. Steven Seagal shot a dude in the balls to death and then burned him in a car. This motherfucker puts another man’s head in a vice, an act used in the film Casino as proof of how utterly depraved and ruthless a character was, and he’s our hero.
But in the end, it’s all forgiven, because this heretofore unknown species of dumpster-dwelling great ape donates a large quantity of money to the Going-Out-of-Business Children’s Hospital, thus cementing him in our minds as a good person. It’s fine, people, he settled up, and did what socialized medicine couldn’t, through sheer volume of murder.
Wouldn’t you just know it, either. Sad little girl, who’s now out of her wheelchair, just happens to be the daughter of Detective Cop Lady.
Yeah, that’s right.
[Madness Montage]
From beginning to end, this film challenged my perception of what boundaries could be pushed via sheer egotism alone. Common sense in filmmaking bent around Steven Seagal’s ego like light deep enough in the well of a black hole, creating a film-like loaf of content starring someone completely unlikable, that the movie tries to convince you is your favorite action star. Today You Die may as well be called Steven (Me) Seagal, because that’s what it’s about, and it pursues this end in as shoddily a fashion as the mind can believe. Just when you think this movie is done fucking with you, the soundtrack during the credits sequence does this:
[THE SOUNDTRACK CHANGE]
This is what living with anxiety is like.
So here we stand, at what can effectively be staked as the end of Seagal’s legitimacy as a box office draw, and the beginning of his use as a name to move an otherwise unmovable project. You’ve seen the most legitimate era of his career, when people put real money behind him, to create things that appear to be actual films, regardless of the shaved sasquatch that keeps wandering into the frame up. And now you’ve seen the end: a fiasco that ended in lawsuits, record low video sales, and the echoing laughter of a mentally cracked and overly wordy internet hobgoblin chronicling its nosedive into obscurity.
Good night, everybody.
