March
17, 2001 | In preparation for his latest comeback vehicle, the aptly
titled Exit Wounds, action star Steven Seagal clipped his ponytail,
shed several excess pounds and, apparently, worked very, very hard at
learning to better enunciate his dialogue. He continues to saunter through
scenes with all the insouciant swagger of a man with a hammer who views
each of his fellows as a potential nail. His saving grace, however,
is that he has begun to develop a healthy sense of humor about himself.
Seagal
seems especially bemused - he stops just short of actually winking at
the audience - when Orin Bond, the Detroit police detective he portrays
in Exit Wounds, is ordered to attend an anger management class.
Not surprisingly, Orin is not a model student. And he's more than a
little embarrassed when he can barely extract his beefy frame from the
constraints of a small desk. But Orin quickly cheers up when, after
leaving the classroom, he finds some foolhardy car thieves to pummel.
Other
funny bits in Exit Wounds involve Seagal's interactions with
Tom Arnold, frightfully well cast as a crass TV talk-show host, and
Anthony Anderson, playing a wisecracking, roly-poly nightclub owner.
The latter two are teamed during the closing credits as talk-show co-hosts,
and their boisterously crude give-and-take suggests a spin-off sequel
might be warranted.
Unfortunately,
the fleeting moments of comic relief are surrounded by long stretches
of generic cop-movie action in Exit Wounds. This is the kind
of by-the-numbers enterprise where, every few minutes, a man shoots
a gun or a woman bares her breasts. For the sake of variety, a couple
of men bare their breasts in a police station locker room. But no woman,
not even the precinct commander played by Jill Hennessy (TV's Law
and Order), ever gets to lock and load. Obviously, the filmmakers
figured there was a limit to how much innovation Steven Seagal's fans
would accept.
Orin,
a rule-busting maverick who somehow manages to enrage his superiors
while saving the life of the U.S. Vice President, is transferred to
the worst precinct in all of Detroit. (The mean streets don't look very
scary, perhaps because most of the movie was shot in Toronto.) With
a little help from his idealistic new partner (Isaiah Washington), our
hero uncovers a dastardly scheme by crooked cops to sell heroin seized
during drug busts. Hip-hop star DMX plays Latrell Walker, a shady character
who figures prominently in the dirty doings. To be more specific about
his role, however, would entail spoiling one of the script's few surprises.
Exit
Wounds might be mildly diverting if you watched it on cable in a
bar during happy hour. Certainly, the movie would lose little on a smaller
screen. Except for two or three action set pieces, director Andrzej
Bartkowiak uses very few of the visual pyrotechnics he displayed in
the far more entertaining Romeo Must Die. Maybe he didn't think
they would help.