With a buildup like that, doesn’t Seagal’s first movie almost have to be anticlimactic? And yet the curious thing is, Seagal more or less deserves the buildup. He does have a strong and particular screen presence. It is obvious he is doing a lot of his own stunts, and some of the fight sequences are impressive and apparently unfaked. He isn’t just a hunk, either.
He can play tender and he can play smart, two notes often missing on the Bronson and Stallone accordions. His aquiline face and slicked-back, slightly receeding hairline accentuate the macho exterior. He moves around too much in closeups, but then he moves around a lot anyway, seeming restless on screen, sometimes swaggering instead of walking.
His first movie is “Above the Law,” and it is nothing if not ambitious. It contains 50 percent more plot than it needs, but that allows it room to grow in areas not ordinarily covered in action thrillers. When was the last time you saw Norris or Schwarzenegger in a film where they ran cars through walls and killed people with their bare hands and went to mass, stood up at baptisms, meditated, hugged their wives, kidded their partners and made speechs about the need for a free and open society? If this film is an audition, it demonstrates that Seagal will try anything.
The movie co-stars Pam Grier, who plays Seagal’s partner but not his squeeze (he’s a happily married father). She was one of the most intriguing action stars of the 1970s before the collapse of the black film market temporarily took her down with it. Seagal and Grier play Chicago police detectives who engineer a major drug bust, only to find their arrests have been quashed by the FBI and they’ve been ordered to stay away from a cocaine kingpin. Why should this guy be immune? In a less ambitious picture, we’d find out about a payoff, blackmail or extortion. “Above the Law” does not lack ambition. We get flashbacks to the hero’s service in the CIA in Vietnam, where he first stumbled across evidence that a CIA official (Henry Silva, venomous and sleek) was using the agency as a cover for drug smuggling. Now there’s another element: Central American political refugees have taken sanctuary in the basement of Seagal’s church, and their priest has information about Silva’s plan to assassinate a senator.
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