At long last, Steven Seagal fans who like guys getting stabbed have a movie to call their own! Attack Force features our Rotund Rambo plunging blades into hopped-up Eurotrash like he actually cared if he saved Paris from having the diabolical drug CTX dumped in its water supply!
Of course, he really doesn’t care all that much; saving Paris is just an unfortunate by-product of getting revenge for the murders of his strike team at the beginning of the film. In fact, since Steve was actually shooting this movie in Romania and nowhere near Paris, he might not have even been aware that Attack Force took place in Paris. Same with his stunt doubles and the guy dubbing his voice about one-third of the time.
We may as well get the business of the stunt doubles and dubbing out of the way so that all these wuss Seagal haters can be shut up once and for all. The thing you need to understand about Seagal is that when you hire Seagal for a movie, you’re not just hiring some dude who’s bloated up a like a dead raccoon along the highway. You’re actually hiring what I like to call “Team Seagal.”
Team Seagal is a veritable strike force of action movie star accoutrements. You get Steve, his various stunt doubles, dialogue replacement guy, black leather trenchcoat assistant, eight personal chefs with training from Arby’s, and his ponytail wrangler. Team Seagal is set up so that they can airdropped into a direct-to-DVD action movie set just as soon as the foreign investors’ check clears.
The thing that a lot of folks lose sight of when the criticize Seagal for this, is that he’s doing it for the fans. Attack Force was his third film of 2006 and he made four more in 2005. Do you think you’d be getting all this Seagal goodness if he was forced to hang around the set all day doing stupid stuff like his own stunts and reading his own lines?
Great leaders are all about setting priorities and big Steve knows that sometimes a bunch of dialogue that doesn’t make any sense anyway would be just as well off being spewed out by some guy who doesn’t sound anything like him.
Besides, that keeps Steve fresh to make those inscrutable expressions during fight scenes and any other scene where he has to stand awkwardly around while someone else is jabberjawing away about some deadly scheme he needs to thwart.
This time around there’s a drug being funded by the U.S. military called CTX that makes people really strong and homicidal. Their homicidal tendencies tend to manifest themselves in one of two ways.
First, these people run around trying to stab and slice you with various knives and when they aren’t doing that, they kick/punch/throw you through brick walls. This results in a lot of clumsy shots of people flying through flimsy-looking walls.
One time, Seagal’s female partner got chucked straight through three walls! The only harm she suffered was a little dust on her blouse which was quite a relief because it meant she was still available to get stabbed to death at the end of the movie.
Before Steve can get down to brass tacks with the scum who are trying to poison the water supply with CTX, he has to contend with the U.S. military! They don’t want anything to come out about CTX that might link them to it and with Seagal digging for answers (this usually involves him making a cell phone call and meeting his lady friend in the corner cafe), it’s time to send in a strike team to clean things up!
Once the military tires of Seagal killing their strike teams, they finally agree to work with him to bring this CTX crisis under control.
With Seagal’s own strike team being killed at the beginning of this mess, he gets outfitted with a brand new Attack Force! Attack Force is some guys dressed up in black gear who run around using hand signals when clearing out the old cathedral where the bad guys are holed up.
One of the people on Attack Force is Seagal’s buddy Duane. Duane is characterized by his attempts to be a bad ass while constantly asking Seagal if they really have a chance.
Seagal of course blandly pooh-poohs any notion that there’s anything to be concerned about even though the CTX has already infected an entire village of people. To Steve, containing an outbreak of a deadly drug that turns people into unstoppable killers is no more exciting that heading out to Mickey D’s to pick up four or five McRibs.
Steve does get roused enough periodically to murder several people. There’s a drugged-up chick he’s got strapped down to a chair that he’s interrogating and she makes the mistake of breaking one of her hands free and tries to choke Steve with it. Result? Stabbed in the gut!
There’s the people that Steve sees are infected with CTX. Shot dead. You’ve also got some military types who are trying to take Steve’s safehouse down while Steve sneaks up from the other side of the house. Two nice, beautiful head shots!
He also manages to cut a really big ass gouge in some broad’s chest before ultimately wiping her out for good.
And finally there’s the chief bad guy. Somehow, Steve needs to stab this guy through the top of his head twice and then chuck him down a hallway and some stairs!
Attack Force is easily one of the best three movies Seagal made in 2006. Dispensing with the need for anything resembling an intelligible story, competent camera work, convincing locations, actors who are anything more than a bullseye to Steve and his blades, and music that isn’t simply a collection of unconnected sounds, Attack Force smartly positions itself as the best Seagal movie where lots of people get stabbed. Frankly, I was inspired to stab myself a couple of times after it concluded!
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