#231: Marked for Death
Release Date: October 5th, 1990
Format: Streaming (Tubi)
Written by: Michael Grais and Mark Victor
Directed by: Dwight H. Little
2.5 Stars
Steven Seagal, the movie star, has had a fascinating career. After his 1988 debut in the film Above the Law, he would go on to star in Hard to Kill (1990), Marked for Death (1990), Out for Justice (1991) and Under Siege (1992). Action film aficionados didn’t know it at the time, but this initial burst of films would compromise the Golden Era of Seagal. They were consistently entertaining and hard-boiled action flicks, not great, but pretty damn good.
And as for Seagal himself, he proved to be a unique and oddly charismatic leading man. He was tall, but he wasn’t particularly handsome or athletic-looking. He spoke unusually - in an almost whisper - with a slight Brooklyn-ish accent that never quite felt authentic. You were always kind of wondering where Seagal was actually from.
He moved strangely, too, especially in his fight sequences. His Aikido training made him earthbound at all times; he rarely kicked and never jumped. He also didn’t really punch. Action and martial arts fans had never seen anything quite like it. Seagal would throw bad guys, flip them, clothesline them, turn them, twist them around. Occasionally he’d exploit leverage and snap their arm in half. It was a limited skill set, but it looked brutally compelling on screen. He stood out from the pack of Stallones and Schwarzeneggers and Van Dammes.
Then in the early ‘90s, infamously, Seagal devolved into one of the more publicly known toxic Hollywood personalities in recent history. He was widely accused by female co-stars of sexual assault, if not downright rape. He was a violent bully on set, and would seriously hurt stunt men during filming to prove his manhood. It seemed that stardom had unleashed and even rewarded his narcissism, and he burned enough bridges through the ‘90s to effectively destroy his Hollywood career.
The last two decades have seen him make mostly dreadfully boring action films from Eastern Europe, where he is still widely popular, and where he is catered to by organized crime financiers. Last I heard, he’s more or less living under the sphere of influence of Putin so he can avoid extradition to the United States, where he fears a host of accusations against him that sprung up during the Me Too movement.
Seagal is an asshole, is what I’m saying.
Does it affect how much I enjoy watching Marked for Death in 2025? Maybe a little, yeah, but it’s still an entertaining action flick. And watching Seagal in 1990 is much more interesting than the mid-to-late period Seagal. For decades now he’s been insufferably writing his own dialogue and choreographing his own fights, hilariously elevating his on-screen persona to god-like proportions. But in Marked for Death, you see a green Seagal that’s trying to please an audience, probably because he’s still a bit unsure of himself. He shows a bit of weakness here and there. He seems human, kinda.
You can see why he became a star, if only for a moment.
