I subscribe to Blockbuster's movie club, where I can order unlimited numbers of DVD's to watch and then return. Unfortunately, I think I've watched every movie I'd ever want to see, and now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. When I got to the bottom, I found Steven Seagal. I don't think I've ever watched an entire movie with him in it, so I thought I'd at least try.
This movie--"Maximum Conviction"--was probably adapted from a short story. A very short story. The plot can be summed up in a couple of sentences: Seagal and other mercenary types are guards at a Gitmo-style prison for ultra bad guys. Two female spy types are delivered to the prison. Some bad guys show up to extract one of the female spies, and Seagal and his guys fight them to the death.
That's the movie. The rest is a lot of jumping around, with flying kicks and chops to the neck and so on. Seagal doesn't do much of that anymore, as he's now porked out to probably 270 pounds or so. There's a lot of gun action, including a lot of improbable gun action. For example, one of Seagal's guys kills a bad guy. He doesn't have a gun, but he doesn't take the bad guy's submachine gun. Instead he uses a propane tank to fashion a bomb to kill the next bad guy. Shooting him would have been much easier, and more certain than risking a propane tank not exploding.
I don't understand Seagal's appeal. Even when he was younger, it seemed like the extent of his acting was either to glare or to kick someone. In this movie he attempts to talk in hip-hop style, which is hilarious, given his age and faint French accent.
To quote Clint Eastwood from "The Gauntlet": I give it a 2, but that's only because I've never seen a 1 before.
