The Seagull Chronicles: DTV Era Vol. III

The Seagull Chronicles, forged in hair grease and questionable police work, are a retelling of the misadventures of Sensei Steven Seagal. The agenda for this instalment is a continuation of our look into the miraculous works of our most esteemed action star in the straight-to-video section of his career. Break out the booze because watching this drivel sober isn’t doing favours for anyone.

After some scientists kill a couple of mice we get to see Stevie giving a martial arts class to a bunch of middle aged Asian guys. Seagal is talking about dim-mak and how it can be used internally or externally, first he displays the external technique by hitting a guy who gets knocked back and then the internal when he destroys a watermelon. The dim-mak that Van Damme did in Bloodsport was way more impressive. Stevie gets challenged by one of his students and he hits him with an internal dim-mak which sends the student flying through a wall, now all students attack him and Steven’s stunt double beats them up. Cut to lunch, I’m pretty sure some guy slipped a macguffin to Seagal. Cut to a 19 year old chick getting naked in front of Seagal, he gives her a big hug as the image fades to black, oh this is going to be a good one. 

So we have yet another case of muddled story as Seagal’s daughter gets kidnapped, government black ops are after him as well as local cops and crooks and on top of that there is some kind of virus formula being smuggled. First half of the movie Seagal spends with a constipated look on his face and the other being just plain bored. There is some dubbing going on and the double has a ton of work but The Seagull does a portion of the action himself. I enjoyed the first half of the movie on the account of it being entertaining while still bad and the plentiful female nudity didn’t hurt the movie either. Then the movie got a bit dull and due to the story being told without much cohesion there was nothing to follow during the dull parts. Action bits are either entertaining or cool for the most part but overall it needed just a bit more to be worthwhile.

Two minutes of credits playing on a blurred shot of big booty bitches, randomness how I love thou. Now the movie cuts to… the movie. We have choppers and a convoy of SUV’s, a battle breaks out, dudes shooting dudes, a cut to a close up of The Seagull out of context not knowing what he is supposedly doing. WHAT IS THIS?! A new low for dubbing the Fatman has been found, this guy isn’t even trying to sound like Seagal, it’s like he is doing a bad impression of Christian Bale’s Batman voice. Chopper pilots speech is out of synch, Seagal has a fight scene with a dude that has some crazy flashy edits and after each cut the combatants are in different positions than the last shot, Seagal does one move to kill the guy and is out of breath. Sweet jebus, this might be the Holy Grail of the shitty Seagal movies.

What serves as a story is that some guy who used to work for some government as a scientist to create a super soldier serum has kept on working on it on his own after the program was shut and he turned it into a party drug. It makes the users into super strong and damn near teleporting, aggressive fucknuts and after creating a posse of these minions out of hot chicks he plans to release it to the water system for reasons unknown. Then there is a bunch of shady backroom deals and whatnot that make no sense or serve no purpose, all you need to know is that Seagal is trying to take down the baddies. So Stevie gets dubbed horribly for a good chunk of the movie (alongside half of the cast!) and the action is unbearable to watch, story is a badly told mess and the movie doesn’t even come to a conclusion as a final slap to the face. There isn’t even proper nudity in this film as in one part a hot bad chick is fighting Seagal and her top is sliced in half yet somehow each half is like glued on to the nipples. Utter shit, an abomination of a movie.

This is promising, opening credits have some cool text effects and Seagal shows up and breaks out of some facility as inconspicuously as you expect a man like Seagal to do so. The Seagull takes out a couple of guys and jogs nonchalantly from cover to cover with the aid of a stunt double and ridiculous close-ups of Seagal thrown to the mix. The stink is starting to be noticeable at this point and we also have some horrid dubbing for the one line Seagal is supposedly saying, then the bomb hits the screen, ‘screenplay by Steven Seagal’. Ugh. 

What happens is that a pilot during a test flight steals a prototype stealth plane and goes off to sell it to some terrorists. Seagal works for the military and has trained the guy so they figure he is the only guy to stop him and if he does this job the military won’t wipe his memory because he knows too much stuff (they don’t tell us anything else about this little sideplot so you can pretty much fuhgettaboutit). Aside from the first five minutes the movie doesn’t have much to offer. Final act has some decent action and there is one scene of lesbian affection that makes no sense but the simple plot is peppered with scenes that are not needed nor do they have any sense behind them but this one was at least entertaining. Rest of the movie is dull as hell with Seagal doing barely anything for a good hour on top of which half of his dialogue is dubbed. Oh goodness this movie was so freakin’ boring, too boring for me to write anymore about it.

Damn. Those last two sucked so hard that I don’t know if I can watch a movie in a month after this. Maybe a good Seagal movie from the 90’s can fix me.