Shadow Man

I decided to rent this 2006 Steven Seagal movie partly because I enjoyed all his old movies (Hard to Kill, Above the Law, Out for Justice, etc.) back when I was in college. There is a certain nostalgia factor in seeing an old school Seagal movie released just last year.

The film opens with Seagal teaching his Dojo students how to fight. He says something about the force power coming from the core of the body, or something like that. He then proceeds to beat up his students one by one. Ordinarily I like mindless fight scenes, but this just made no sense whatsoever. I was left thinking, Huh?

There's this plot element where various people - high level criminals, the CIA, are all after this priceless item in the hands of Steven Seagal. His daughter gets kidnapped, I don't know why. And it even appears the female kidnapper might be a good person after all, indirectly helping out Seagal. Why that is, I don't know.

In fact a lot of elements in this movie didn't make sense at all. The car chase scene was scattered and hard to follow. The action scenes were shallow and unsatisfying. I found myself not caring what happens the rest of the story.

The most disappointing is that I actually liked Seagal's old movies, but not this one. I'm puzzled as to why there's so much user feedback on imdb who said they enjoyed this. What I should do is borrow one of his older movies (maybe Marked for Death which I remembered as particularly fun to watch), just to convince myself that the older films are still good, and that Shadow Man was just an off day.

Rating: 1/5 *
Huh?