A Dangerous Man

It’s no secret that most of Steven Seagal’s straight to video efforts stink. There have been a few that manage to rise above abysmal and can be watched without cursing everyone involved in making the film. Ruslan and The Keeper fall into this category; while they’re not likely to make any new Seagal fans, they at least offer some entertaining violence, and Seagal actually seemed to show up to the set for work most of the time.

Last year we had Kill Switch, which was my top choice for worst Seagal film ever.  The plot was your standard cop tracks serial killers and unleashes vigilante justice nonsense that we’ve all seen at least a dozen times. Horrible editing and obvious stunt doubles crippled the film, and most of the time it seemed like they’d just editing pictures of Seagal in here and there just to make it look like he was around now and then.

So now we have A Dangerous Man. Seagal is the titular dangerous man. At the start of the film he is wrongfully arrested for murder, spends 6 years in jail in the blink of an eye, and is then released because DNA evidence proved he wasn’t guilty. Seagal bitches about his time in jail and how his $300,000 settlement doesn’t make up for his wasted life. I feel his pain; I’ve wasted hours on his movies and he’s never even sent me a dime to make amends.

After getting out of jail, Seagal buys himself some cheap bourbon and is trying to get his drink on near an abandoned parking lot when some random gangsters get into a shoot out. In one of the many nearly unlit scenes, Seagal saves a young Russian gangster and a girl who was trapped in a car trunk with a big stash of cash which evidently belongs to the Chinese mafia. This sets the stage for a whole lot of horribly lit battles between characters whose names I can’t even recall. Each battle is generic and uninteresting. Seagal’s typically be-wigged stunt double can be seen from time to time when a fight accidentally strays into an area near a light bulb.

A Dangerous Man isn’t as stunningly bad as Kill Switch, but it’s bland to the point that you won’t even get any amusement out of making fun of it. I seriously can’t remember the name of a single character in the film, and I just finished watching it. I can’t even remember what Seagal’s name was supposed to be, not that it matters since he always plays the exact same character in every film.

In short, just skip this one. There’s nothing here that’s worthwhile even for bad film mockery. Let’s all walk away and pretend this never happened, which should be pretty easy because even if you ignore my warning and watch it, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember much of anything that occurred in the film 5 minutes after the credits roll.