Steven Seagal stars in this movie as a hotshot senior bomb squad technician who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty and has a very casual borderline-delusional shallowly-serious demeanour & stride like even bombs & bullets can’t touch him.
Terrible Irish accents from Dennis Hopper and Michael Halsey are almost comical.
Oh and it’s a terror-themed movie in 2001 – what a surprise.
Tom Sizemore co-stars in this movie, as possibly the main character – a detective trying to track down the Irish terror cell. Dennis Hopper plays the main baddie. Rappers Nas and Ice-T also take minor roles in this movie. And Jaime Pressly (star of Poison Ivy III) plays a major role, as a captured member of the terror group. Joe Spano (the FBI guy from early seasons of NCIS) plays the police captain responsible for managing Seagal’s and Sizemore’s characters.
Seagal has a big belly already in this movie, making him hobble slowly when he tries to walk fast, and his action work is significantly reduced from previous movies to the point where he’s not even the clear number 1 star of the show any more. Sizemore is kind of the main guy in this movie, based on screen time and acting talent. And in the closing credits, Dennis Hopper is listed 2nd, so Seagal is officially deemed only the 3rd main character in this movie, which is weird since it portrays him as some kind of untouchable hotshot throughout, and the main hero at the end, as if it were just another show based around him, but lacking in screen time and action work compared to what we’re used to from his other movies.
The penultimate ten minutes, when the drama moves over to City Hall, is pretty poor to say the least, reminiscent of Seagal’s worst ever movies, even though prior to that things were pretty captivating, and in the very final 5 or 10 minutes things pick up a little bit as Seagal and Sizemore try to defuse a bomb each at different ends of the building. Although the very last few minutes, from when Seagal focuses on his own task, to when the movie ends, that stretch is barely watchable – it’s 99% suspense and white noise, very little actually happening.
Even though this movie is a bit of a cheap mess, its cast quality, acting quality, genre, pace of action, and its general atmosphere, make it an OK movie in my eyes, relatively speaking, if we can forgive its underlying motives which are hard to avoid in Hollywood, hence relatively speaking. It’s no worse than most of Seagal’s early movies prior to Under Siege (1992). Indeed it’s about equal to Above the Law (1988), Hard To Kill (1990), and Out For Justice (1991). And it’s not nearly as bad as Seagal’s worst early movie, which was unequivocally Marked For Death (1990) in my humble opinion.