Reviews

All I wanted from this film was 90 minutes of mindless entertainment (I had no illusions about its grandeur) but it was so lame that I'm mad I wasted any time on it at all. Three points are for special effects and one is for Josh "Tasty Treat" Lucas.

First, Kurt Russell plays some tight ass dad who gets all bent out of shape because his daughter has one button of her blouse undone. PLEASE! This is Jack Burton, Snake Plisskin, Sergeant Todd, Gabe Cash - even the The Computer (who) Wore Tennis Shoes - not some repressed psycho-dad.

Richard Dreyfus was totally irrelevant as the movie's token gay. I guessed he was gay because he was wearing a big honking diamond earring in one ear and a bow-tie. My hunch was proved true when he morphed into a sad and pathetic old man who kept calling his young ex-loverman on the phone begging him to call back. He also did some fey thing at the dinner table but I can't remember exactly what it was – this was right before he was going to dramatically throw himself into the sea over his lost love.

As we are introduced to other characters I realize that everyone so far is white and this only changes when we are taken to the kitchen – down here we seem to have a lively mix of minorities.

Even more lamely, everything starts to happen at midnight on New Years Eve.

The bridge is staffed with an all white male crew while the black captain, the excellent Andre Braugher, is ringing in the New Year in the dining room with the white guests. Not much diversity here. One officer on duty mysteriously senses that something is "not right" while the captain sits oblivious to everything except the singer Fergie. Then lo and behold through the binoculars – it's a gigantic rogue wave! ** Lots of big special effects. ** A few ship toss survivors decide to hot foot it out of the upside down dining room and a nice waiter, the super duper Freddy Rodriguez, volunteers to help them find their way out. He is so generous in fact that he insists Dreyfus pass over an elevator shaft on a makeshift bridge first. When it's time for Freddy to cross there are of course problems and he ends up hanging from Dreyfus' ankle in the elevator shaft. What follows is a very unpleasant scene. The elevator is shaking loose and will be falling back down/up the shaft to squish everyone– and oh no – they're unable to pull the combined Dreyfus and Freddie up to safety! "Shake him off! Shake him off!" Josh tells Dreyfus, but Freddy will not be shaken off... so Dreyfus kicks him off and poor, helpful Freddy falls screaming to his death.

During this nonsense Russell's film daughter is trapped in the disco (is it 1978 again?!?) where her manly fiancé is stuck under a huge metal lighting stand. Being the delicate creature that she is, she's unable to budge that prodigious foe alone. Oh, look! It's Mía Maestro, the Hispanic waiter's girl friend! She can help with this difficult manual labor task! Also, send her over to pick through the dead bodies to find something sturdy to use as a lever. Miss Priss will stay here by her man in need. I miss the adventurous Shelley Winters.

** Lots more crap and a funny Kevin "Lucky Larry" Dillon moment. **

The only good thing about this movie? Seeing puffed up plastic Botox-face Fergie go down with the ship.

By the end of the film Andre, Freddy and Mia are all dead and six white people are miraculously saved. Yay for them!

I know the director is German, but come on.

Let's see... it starts out bad and goes to worse. In the opening scenes his army buddy gets killed because Seagal's character (who is supposedly a top-notch operative) does not seem to grasp the concept of "covert mission."

Then we have the FBI supervisor William Atherton who had better lines in Real Genius, and calls in Seagal to investigate a power struggle in the Tokyo underworld. Apparently, nobody in any local law enforcement organization understands the Yakuza like Seagal.

They totally wasted the fabulous Chiaki Kuriyama - but maybe it's better for her that she was not more visible in this dog.

The clichés are hard to keep track of, here are just a few: 1. Alienated loner teamed with rookie 2. Rookie killed trying to impress the IL' tough guy 3. Loner has finally found love with young hottie, which only serves to get her killed (again because of that covert deficiency) 4. Multiple family murder-revenge story lines 5. The clash of the traditional gangster who lives by a code of conduct and the modern ultra-violent criminal with no respect for anyone or anything

For as long as Seagal has been making movies you'd also think he'd learn a thing or two - maybe even work on a second facial expression. Also, he seems to have lost the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality. In both he imagines himself to be a Japanese sensei and reluctant samurai, and this conceit is getting old, old, old.