by Deputy
So, at Tex’s insistence I watched The Perfect Weapon. It’s a 1991 action film that’s only purpose was to introduce Jeff Speakman and Kenpo (not Kendo, that’s different) to an American audience. It did not really succeed on either account but actually was a pretty good film otherwise. I wrote a review but then Tex told me the film I was supposed to watch is Perfect Weapon from 2016, a very different movie which sometimes calls itself The Perfect Weapon in promotional material. My bad.
Perfect Weapon is…what it is. It’s not so bad it’s good. It doesn’t devolve into accidental comedy like The Room nor into barely connected chaos like Megalopolis did. It’s a low budget film, the last of the direct-to-DVD trickle in the era of direct-to-Blu-ray but before direct-to-streaming, and it shows it in almost every way.
The important thing plot-wise is that the government, we are led to believe, is evil. It is future dystopia 2029, not the real 2029 we are heading towards with the speed and grace of a dumpster rolling downhill, so everything is dark and underexposed. Drones patrol the sky for thought criminals. Every building bears computer generated screens of Steven Seagal’s bloated visage reciting fortune cookie Zen nonsense. This dystopia is so generic that we get nothing more about it the entire film. Just the nebulous ideas “future”, “surveillance”, “director”, and “drone”. Steven Seagal playing a villain struck me immediately – he purportedly refused many offers because he only played “good guys”. That he was a side character and not the Perfect Weapon was even better in my opinion.
The plot revolves around Axon slash Condor (blink and you’ll miss the one time we hear his actual name), a government hitman in the Agent 47 mold (Bald, menacing, emotions programmed out of him). Instead of AMT Hardballer longslides, his signature weapons are a pair of nickel plate Sig P220 Sports with the ridiculous rail mounted compensators attached, but he uses these sparingly for budgetary reasons. Condor’s actor (Johnny Messner) actually does a pretty decent Agent 47 impression, and by that I mean he comes across as an absolute weirdo in every scene. He’s almost too charismatic for the role, actually, which is at odds with his character’s dialogue.
The best part of this movie is the first 20 minutes or so, which sets up the main conflict of the film. Condor refuses to kill a witness (Sasha Jackson) who reminds him of his dead wife, this woman turns out to also be an agent of the state, she snitches as soon as she is off screen. Condor’s handler, played by Richard Tyson, scolds him then takes him for reprogramming but he escapes. It’s all gunplay, little choreography, but it works in a cheesy kind of way.
A digression I must make, if you’ll indulge me for a minute: this strict an interpretation of “leave no witnesses” gets weird quick. The office workers get to gossiping about new bald angry people showing up all the time, word gets out that life expectancy is short in this agency, the cost-of-living bump they promised isn’t actually coming, and suddenly your hitmen want to unionize. It’s Cobra Commander levels of incompetent evil. Or is it evil incompetence?
Anyway, the rest of the film drags on, but the gist is that Condor finds his wife in a different cell of the same thought prison he was sent to. They fight off henchmen for a while as they escape, and the other hitmen (whom we’ve never met before now) get live video of Condor and the wife who’s name I can’t recall piped into their minority report themed kendo dojo. They all watch the screen silently, leaving their intent ambiguous for the next 5-ish minutes. There’s an ok fight scene in a bathroom, lots of broken porcelain. I think my favorite bathroom fight scenes are The Last Detail (great Navy film, young Jack Nicholson) and The World’s End, and both did it better. But it’s fine.
Condor is captured and tortured by a character known only as “the interrogator” (which is the naming convention throughout the movie. Seagal is just “the director”, Tyson is “the controller”). The torturer is Vernon Wells, another name you might recognize, and he seems to be having fun in this scene. Good for him. The controller appears and rescues Condor and wife, revealing himself to be the actual head of the resistance whose figureheads Condor killed in the opening. They then prepare, with the help of the Cronus, the only named hitman from the dojo, to storm the director’s palace and seize the reins of government for the people.
Cronos gets killed, Condor has a heart to heart with Steven Seagal who shows him with his crystal ball that his wife isn’t his wife, she’s also a hitman and is manipulating him with the Controller. Condor kills the director, goes downstairs, has a fight with the henchmen coming up, who are then attacked by the non-named hitmen from the dojo in all their men’s warehouse rental suit glory, and Condor confronts the Controller and the not-wife, shooting both. He then poses triumphantly atop the building and all the CGI screens switch to show the liberating scene. The final scene shows Steven Seagal slumped in the chair where Condor left him, leaning over like a bag of marshmallows thrown on a shelf. A second, equally greasy looking Steven Seagal enters and they talk about how the first one was just a brother or body double. Something Something. Inferior genes. Standing Steven Seagal then kills Sitting Steven Seagal with a weeabo katana, and gets photoshopped into a CGI helicopter to escape for the sequel.
I’ll be honest, I don’t feel good ripping this movie apart. Writing reviews on bad movies is fun. It’s cathartic. You can get a little mean with it, chew the scenery, really drive home how terrible it is. That’s why so many people do these reviews, and why many of them overblow how bad the films are. It’s easy to wax poetic and make the thing seem much worse than it really is. I’m going to do all of that, probably on accident, but I do feel bad. Because this isn’t a Steven Seagal film, it’s somebody else’s film that happens to have Steven Seagal in it.
Steven Seagal is even worse in this than he is in anything I have seen him do this century. He moves like a garbage truck stuck in first gear as he slowly does white belt aikido. He clearly fumbles several lines and according to an interview with Titus Parr, the director, who refused to do any second takes or take direction. From the same interview, he refused the role initially because he wanted to play Condor, nude shower scene included. He only agreed when the director convinced him that his character was actually the good guy in the end. Titus Parr in the end comes across as a righteous dude who wanted to make this a weird throwback to the stupid movies of his childhood. He laughs now about the reviews because, as he put it, “nobody gives Steven Seagal movies good reviews”.
The fight scene between the Director (the character) and Condor, who’s actor is very physical, is terrible to the point of derision as he lazily mimes this or that and Johnny Messner overreacts as if it were the hardest hit in the world. He’s wearing 90s pill-framed amber sunglasses through the entire thing, which is tinted very blue for most of his scenes, so your eyes are just drawn to these orange yellow glasses perched on his perspiring nose. His character spends most of the movie seated and fawning over a woman with no lines who’s easily young enough to be his granddaughter. She honestly may only be on set to keep Seagal in one place while they filmed around him. I will be honest, Seagal might not have read the script. Most of his lines seem like the kind of stuff he says anyway, and he mumbles his way through his McDojo ramblings in the affected Cajun drawl he used to pull out for “Steven Seagal: Lawman” back when he paid Jefferson Parish to pretend he was competent.
Actually, there’s another tangent I have to go on. He was a “Reserve Deputy Chief” in that agency, which is to mean he carried a gun and arrested people with no formal training. Until 2022 Louisiana did not require Reserve police officers to have any formalized training or continuing education, and the Louisiana POST (Police Officer Standards & Training) has no record of him ever gaining or presenting them a law enforcement certification. The catch was, if a reserve officer had no certification, they have to have a real cop babysit them when on duty, which is why he’s always surrounded by 5 or 6 real cops on that show. His “Hand selected elite team of deputies”, which included the 3rd highest cop in that agency, were there to make sure Jefferson Parish didn’t get sued because of his actions.
When Jefferson Parish gave him the boot after 1 season for *maybe* allegedly trafficking people and *probably* allegedly sexually harassing his young executive assistant (she never filed formal charges so the issue was dropped), he went to Maricopa County Arizona, another state that didn’t require any law enforcement training for reserve officers. He claims he’s certified in California but when queried California POST asks “Who? Never heard of him”. If you’ve never watched that show, it is a special treat. A Colonel with the Sheriff’s Office is his primary minder and generally treats him like the overgrown child he is.
The involvment of someone as unpleasant as Steven Seagal would normally cause me to fire with both barrels because he’s been a piece of shit the entire time I’ve been alive, but the impression I get here is a very low budget film that tried to leverage a few old names in B-Movie scifi schlock to get eyes on the screen, and I can’t really fault them for that. Steven Seagal was a very different media property in 2014 when production maybe began (details on the who, what and why of this film are non-existent). I suspect the film spent most of its budget on getting his name and photoshopped face on the cover and the rest of the film got the scraps.
When you view the film through that lens, it begins to make a lot of sense. The action scenes are all vapid and short because there was no choreography budget. The transitions to try to make it look punchy are constant and erratic, because the editor was doing what they could with what they had. I don’t think the film had any stunt people as every actor seems to be doing their own. Very few firearms are used in the film despite being carried a lot. The script doesn’t have dialogue, it has exposition. Sometimes the characters exposit to each other like sims stuck in a room with no door, but more often it is directed at the viewer so we can follow along. This movie tells, it does not show. It all comes together in what feels like a first draft that never got punched up by rewrites. It can’t decide if it wants to explore the dystopia, Condor’s character arc, or the action scenes.
If I had to use one phrase to describe this film, it would be “colorful but otherwise boring”. I kept having to go back not because I missed something but because I forgot I was watching this for a reason and opened another tab absent-mindedly. This feels in many ways like a rip off of Blade Runner 2049 with a dash of Equilibrium. Like, it came out at least a year (again dates are sketchy) before that film but has the aura of a SpiderDude: Into the Webmaze or Ring of the Lords: Hobbit’s Tale, something meant to confuse well-meaning old ladies buying for their grandchildren. Even the cover, with Steven Seagal haphazardly photographed onto a double’s body (they do this in a flashback in the film as well), fits this to a T.
I suppose I like it more in retrospect than I did watching it, but I wouldn’t watch it again. Maybe I like what it could have been as my memories calcify and the sins of the film recede into the indefinite mist of the past. As a final observation, I have a note that I wrote down while watching the film, and all it says is “Stockholm syndrome isn’t real, but the plan was dumb already so no harm no foul I guess”. I have already forgotten which part of the film spawned this thought but I find it amusing even still. And that is maybe why we watch bad movies in the end.
Deputy is a recluse who would prefer not to be known but is dragged, kicking and screaming, into participation by Tex on occasion. Picture is unrelated.
