Reviving this thread to note that actor Brian Cox has a new book out wherein he dumps on a few Hollywood stars, including Seagal (albeit nothing most of us didn't already think about him):

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/tv/...-his-new-book/

Don't forget that he shat himself when Gene Lebell choked him out.

A 5 year bump was worth it. 😂

I don’t think the image of Seagal shitting himself CAN be forgotten.

I would have swore that I already posted this but some years back (maybe 10), I was at a pub with some friends in Royal Oak, Michigan. We're sitting around when this ginormous Steven Seagal clone comes walking in and takes a table with 8 chairs for just himself. I commented that that guy looks like he ate Steven Seagal... and sure enough, it was him -- about 75 lbs heavier than anyone was used to seeing him -- and he was local to film some direct to TV movie.

After I saw Under Siege, I watched nearly all Seagal movies. On Deadly Grounds may’ve been the last one.

Steven Seagal had some very fun to watch films, and one of better action films out there is on his resume, Under Siege, but yikes...he just went down a steady path to irrelevance once his movies stopped being decent box office draws. I remember when by brother in law (who is a special effects artist) told me many, many years back that he was told that extras on the set of a Seagal film did not like the guy because he was a bully. He said that instead of pulling back when he was performing a martial arts move, that he would revel in going all the way and causing the person on the other end of his fists some actual pain.

It just colored my view of the guy at the point that I learned this about him. And this was over 20 years back, so it has been awhile since I thought of the guy as anything else other than a has-been action star who was nothing but a bully for the most part. Sad.

I did quite enjoy Under Siege. It was a great action movie and really allowed Tommy Lee Jone and Gary Busey to chew the scenery, and the main chick (the one that jumps outta the cake was a smokeshow) was pretty good. I even enjoy the second one to a certain extent, and felt that Eric Bogosian made a great bad guy. The only other one of his I kind of like is Out for Justice. Like you, I would go on to rent a ton of his '90s output, but they just kept getting progressively worse, and at a certain point I just gave up.

I think I'd also say some of his later movies became like, ultra-violent, as if that was the key selling point. It might've been that kind of shitty "environmentalist" movie he did, The Patriot (not to be confused with the Mel Gibson one, obviously), but I could've sworn that now was so violent my parents made me and my brother shut that one off. It may have been a different movie but that one seems to ring a bell...

I watched Under Siege again a month ago. It's a fine 80s action movie. I read that director initially didn't want to do the movie because it had Seagal in it. Apparently, he got his reputation as a prick very quickly.

For a couple of years, after Exit Wounds, I watched most of Seagals movies, in the hope for one being as good as his early ones. Ticker, Out for a Kill, Half Past Dead, Into The Sun, Out of Reach, Submerged, Deathly Weapon, A Dangerous Man, Born to raise Hell and the feature length pilot of True Justice. Deathly Weapon was the only one which wasn't total garbage and I realized I had watched more of those stinkers than the ones I liked in the past and so I stopped.
Jean-Claude Van Dammes movies suffered in quality too, but from time to time he made a entetaining one, but I stopped watching those after JCVD, since there was no chance he would ever make a better one again.
I'm still watching Nicolas Cage movies, but not all of them, since there are to many, but at least his movies, for the most part, have decent production values.

The director, -Andrew Davis, -had also directed Seagal's first film "Above The Law".

The day we secretly yearned for has finally arrived:

Putin gives U.S. actor Seagal top state award for 'humanitarian work'
https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-...rk-2023-02-27/

Man, if we can get a low budget, straight-to-video action movie starting Seagal and Dennis Rodman, we may be able to achieve world peace!

With a special appearance by Donald Trump as the President of the United States! Hell, Putin and Kim would probably play themselves just to be close to such a triumvirate of geniuses.

Quote for the video sleeve: "Some people have said to me, big strong men, and they're crying, and they're saying that this is the greatest movie ever made." – John Barron

Need to start thinking up some three-word Seagal-worthy titles:
FORCE OF JUSTICE? IMPACT OF KILL? DRIVEN TO FURY? ATTACK OF BUFFET?

Yes, he broke Sean Connery's wrist training him for Never Say Never Again!

I haven't watched a Seagal film in decades. I do wonder if he ever learned how to run like a normal person?

No, he didn't and in the last 10 years or so he had stuntdoubles getting in and out of cars.

Amusing, but heavily stacked in favour of Van Damme from the outset. I think both of those are among the more entertaining movies either of them made back then, but they're very different beasts: DOUBLE IMPACT feels like an upper-grade Cannon picture (which it wasn't, but being produced by Ashok Armitraj it wasn't too far off the mark, aesthetically speaking), and is a bit silly even when it's not trying to be, while OUT FOR JUSTICE feels like a mid-level Warner Brothers cop thriller of the era (which it basically was). And the "rolled-up sock" as he dismissively calls it? Come on, there was more to it than that.

As it should be lol.

Anything's possible with hindsight! Van Damme will likely leave behind the better legacy, if only by way of having made fewer pieces of awful DTV shit than Seagal. But at the time, both guys were in their prime, and both movies performed equally well relative to their budgets. And Seagal was a thing, and still had a few years to go before he morphed into an actual . . . "thing". Without OUT FOR JUSTICE and MARKED FOR DEATH, we probably wouldn't have gotten the even higher-concept UNDER SIEGE pictures, which have earned some praise in this thread. The dude in that video clearly uses judicious editing to make a mostly empty case against OUT FOR JUSTICE. Then again, even his fawning praise for DOUBLE IMPACT seems a bit insincere, so . . .

One area where Van Damme beats Seagal is in his comic timing and willingness to lampoon himself a bit. That first happened in DOUBLE IMPACT but the moments are kinda cringey, but the screenwriters of a lot of his subsequent movies would often give him sometimes subtle lines and gags that I doubt Seagal was capable of even in his prime. I can only remember one moment where Seagal kinda made himself the butt of the joke. I can't remember which movie it was, but it was a scene where he's sitting in one of those old-school classroom desks, and when he goes to stand up he's stuck in it so he smashes it in frustration. It got a pretty big laugh in the theater, but he never really capitalized on it and I think it wasn't too much later that his DTV slide began.

He still has it?

I love the comments.

"When your brain says UFC but your body says KFC."

"He looks like Peter griffin dressed up like Steven Seagal"

"The only thing under siege is the nearest McDonalds."

"Great actor... Steven Seagal as well."

Pretty much every Seagal 'demonstration' video looks like everyone else is working overtime to make him look good (no unexpected or realistic attacks, somersaulting away from him because that's what you do, apparently). Goes way back. As one of the commenters notes on one of these clips, he's the Milli Vanilli of martial arts.