A Dangerous Man
Director: Keoni Waxman
Starring: Steven Seagal, Mariaina Mah, and Vitaly Kravchenko
**
It must be so much fun being a 1980s action hero. Even one on the second tier such as Steven Seagal gets to live off his past glories. Seagal was always in the shadow of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme, yet even in 2011 (as in well past what should have been his best-before-date) A Dangerous Man has the 60-year-old martial arts star playing an ex-special forces soldier, Shane Daniels. Before the credits roll he's in a fight and is then wrongly imprisoned.
It doesn't matter one iota that jail seems like the perfect place for Daniels, given that just hours after finishing a six-year sentence he's getting into a whole heap of trouble, and not just because he's eaten too many pies. When Keoni Waxman directs with tongue firmly in cheek, kicking off with Daniels beating up a couple of muggers in front of a store and stealing their car, the film raises a smile.
But it soon starts getting really rather silly as Daniels witnesses the killing of a police officer and finds a bag of cash in the boot of a car in the middle of nowhere. In no time Seagal is fighting it out to the death with Chinese and Russian gangs. Our hero is, of course, invincible. There is something unarguably beguiling and heartwarming about the refusal of Seagal movies to bow to the sands of time and their adherence to formula, but unfortunately it's not enough to carry 90 long minutes.
