Heavy Action: HARD TO KILL

You can take this one to the bank. The blood bank.

1990's Hard to Kill was my introduction to Steven Seagal. He had already made and released his first feature, Above the Law, two years prior but that wasn't on my radar for whatever reason. Hard to Kill, on the other hand, very much was, and I don't know if that's because the ads were more incessant or the title more memorable or because it also starred Kelly LeBrock, on whom I had nursed a crush since Weird Science, a movie I still don't really like. Whatever the reason, Hard to Kill was high on my "want to see" list that year. Because it was rated R, though, and because I wasn't able to talk my newly-divorced dad into taking me to see it (guess he had other stuff on his mind), I had to wait for VHS. That's kind of ok. This is the kind of movie that's made to be watched repeatedly on VHS, and that's exactly what I did.

Seagal plays the excellently-named Mason Storm, a cop who stops a convenience store robbery on Oscar night 1983. I'm not sure why that's important, but there's a lot of dialogue about the Oscars, which I really like. It means that Mason Storm got to see Gandhi beat E.T. for Best Picture, a bigger crime than that convenience store robbery he stopped. Anyway, he goes home to his wife and bad guys break in and kill her and shoot him but he doesn't die because these fuckers don't realize he's hard to kill. He instead goes into a coma for seven years, during which time he grows a hilarious coma beard -- more of a coma goatee -- and is nursed back to health by Kelly LeBrock, Seagal's real-life wife at the time the movie was made. Still a target for the mob hitmen who tried to kill him in the first place, Mason Storm has to recuperate in secret and then get his revenge against all the bad guys (including a senator played by the great William Sadler) who killed his wife, tried to kill him and his son, stole seven years from his life, and never even took the time to write.

In my younger days, I would measure the quality of a Steven Seagal movie by the length of his ponytail, ergo Out for Justice is better than Marked for Death, which is better than Hard to Kill, which is better than Above the Law. That all went out the window with the release of Under Siege, definitely one of his best and easily his most commercial movie in which he sports no ponytail at all. WTF. At least Under Siege keeps the titling tradition wherein you can put the words "Steven Seagal IS..." in front of all his early movies, even if it does lose the three-word structure. My point is that Hard to Kill is pretty good, albeit not as well made as some of his other movies directed by the likes of Andrew Davis, John Flynn, and Dwight H. Little. This one is directed by Bruce Malmuth, whose only other noteworthy credit is the very good 1981 thriller Nighthawks with Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams. He also plays the ring announcer in The Karate Kid and The Karate Kid Part II. For an actor playing a ring announcer, he's an ok director.

Besides the shortness of his pony tail, Hard to Kill finds Seagal still in his "just cop" period, when being a detective with the LAPD was still enough to build his mythology and develop his onscreen persona. Not too much later (I want to say it starts around Under Siege?), we start getting mysterious backstories for all of his characters -- he's former CIA or some nondescript shadow operation that makes him not just sound much cooler, but also much tougher and more intimidating. It's always a matter of "you don't even know what this guy can do" in all of his movies shortly after this one. I prefer him in pissed off cop mode. He seems pretty pissed off through this whole movie, even in his "softer" scenes, but at least it leads to some great one liners like my favorite: "That's for my wife, fuck you and die." Not clever, not sugar-coated, just a man finally opening up and saying what he means.

Seagal's co-star in Hard to Kill is the aforementioned Kelly LeBrock (wife #3 and wouldn't be the last). She's one of the better co-stars Seagal ever had, I'm guessing because their real-life relationship affords them some degree of on-screen romantic chemistry, an area in which Seagal is otherwise totally deficient. For the most part, his movies couldn't be less interested in making him a romantic lead. I would say that's because his characters are always all about the job they have to do, but I suspect it has more to do with Seagal barely being convincing as a human being, much less a partner to someone else. As much as I think his outsized ego would make him love being portrayed as a ladies' man, he's far too selfish a performer to share the spotlight with another actor in that way. Just read up on his abuse of stunt men as a way of putting himself over and you'll understand.

I come here not to litigate the shittiness of Steven Seagal the Person, I come to praise Hard to Kill. Kind of. There's stuff I like in this movie that we don't necessarily get in other Seagal movies, but I also know that there are several Seagal movies I like more than this one. I'm always a little surprised when people name it as their favorite, even though it holds a special place in my heart. For better or worse, this was the movie that more or less bought Seagal his career. Whereas Above the Law made audiences sit up and take notice, Hard to Kill was a huge hit and grossed $75 million worldwide on a budget of only $11.5m. It's the movie that helped codify the Seagal persona on screen. It offers one of the better actors to play a Seagal villain in William Sadler (credited here as "Bill") even though it doesn't seem 100% sure how to handle him. I mean, he kind of gets taken to the blood bank but it's not a full withdrawal if you get what I mean. I hope you do because I'm not even sure myself.

Hard to Kill played as part of F This Movie Fest a couple of years back when we did 1990 as the year and it remember it being a sneaky favorite or a lot of people. Maybe it's the kind of movie that plays best in a group, which explains why it was such a hit in the communal setting of movie theaters back upon release. Every movie is more fun with a crowd, but genre stuff like action and horror and comedy is particularly fun because it garners such a visceral response. Even as a kid back in 1990, it felt kind of cool discovering a new action star in real time, especially when Jean-Claude Van Damme was coming up around the same period and it felt like a new class was being ushered in behind heavyweights like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. The shift in the marketplace and Seagal's own awfulness meant he didn't enjoy the same kind of career longevity as a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone, but that's as much on him as it is anything else. His career was pretty easy to kill.

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