Why are Steven Seagal Movies a guilty pleasure?

To me there is nothing better than a Steven Seagal movie. I know it is full of violence and everything that I do not what my son to see. Even though he is nine months old this is not what children should see. My love of professional wrestling, combat movies, and B movie Spring Break adventures have always been a stress release for me. I know childish frat boy entertainment.


The acting in a Seagal movie is C level at best if you were to give it a grade. Does anyone really give a care how it is acted if you watch one of these movies? I know I do not. I watch because it is so unrealistic it at times is comical. I see the “bad guys” in the movie drop their weapons to go fist on fist with Segal. Who in their right mind would ever do that?

Seagal normally plays an American hero. An ex soldier trying to right a wrong. He gets thrust into all kinds of situations that play right into the hands of Seagal to kill and mame thousands of people. Not exactly family entertainment.

I started watching Kung Fu Theatre as a twelve year old boy on Saturday mornings. The show was subtitled in English and was absolutely the most violent show of its time. The show always appeared right after Saturday morning wrestling, my friends and I would enjoy every Kung Fu kick and punch that was delivered. This was where my love of Seagal movies was born.

In Seagal films, or Aation films in general have a reputation for dipping into the realm of right wing propaganda now and then, so Seagal's movies (often influenced by his left-leaning personal beliefs) can seem refreshingly different, or they can seem just plain bizarre, depending on how you look at them.

From the start, with his screen debut in Andrew Davis' Above the Law, Seagal has been adding his own stamp to these films. Above the Law is basically a loose remake of Davis' Chuck Norris vehicle Code of Silence. Both movies feature martial arts experts playing rebellious Chicago cops who fight corruption, and they even have a lot of the same actors, but while the Norris film is content to take on police corruption, Seagal's movie tackles America's role in the Vietnam War, CIA involvement in drug smuggling, the plight of Nicaraguan refugees, and (in a roundabout way) the Iran-Contra scandal.

Seagal's third film, Dwight Little's Marked for Death, starts off with a prologue about the futility of the War on Drugs and corruption in the DEA. Then, these themes are never mentioned again for the remainder of the film.

Seagal's politics never really took over a film altogether until his directorial debut, On Deadly Ground. Seagal stars as a sort of an expert firefighter who works for a major oil company and specializes in putting out oil well fires. If this seems like an odd thing for an action hero to specialize in, keep in mind that the most effective way to extinguish an oil well fire is to blow it up with dynamite. By the end of the film, Seagal has dropped the oil company's CEO into a pool of crude oil and blown up an entire oil refinery around him. Then, Seagal spends three and a half minutes talking about global warming and alternative energy sources. Shear awesomeness.

Félix Enríquez Alcalá's Fire Down Below is the only other Seagal film to tackle environmental issues, and the environmental threat here is just some sort of generic toxic waste. You can tell that it's poisonous because it's green. Amazingly, Seagal plays an undercover EPA agent and he carries a gun. He arrests people. Apparently, nobody involved in the production had the slightest clue what the EPA actually does.

In Seagal's first direct-to-video feature, Dean Semler's The Patriot (not to be confused with the Mel Gibson Revolutionary War picture), Seagal faces off against a right-wing militia group that releases a deadly virus in a small Midwestern town to make a point about, well, probably something kind of stupid.

For the most part, Seagal's post-Patriot output is kind of short on political messages, aside from the sort of CIA villains and corrupt cops that pop up in about half of all the action movies that have been made since the eighties. One notable exception, though, is Ching Siu-Tung's Belly of the Beast, an indictment of Thailand's military. For a little context, the Royal Thai Army was recently in the news for overthrowing the administration of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and they've been making veiled threats about possibly overthrowing the new government as well.

Each and every one of these movies always has me wanting for more. Sorry I am wasting that education you paid for Dad. I have the Seagal bug.


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