The Asian Connection (or just Asian Connection on the cover) has Seagal as a drug lord in Thailand, whose money in Cambodian bank accounts keeps getting stolen by a couple hipsters. Turns out his henchman who suggested putting his money in the Cambodian banks is tipping off the hipsters. Inexplicably it takes Seagal most of the movie to figure this out, and in the meantime we follow the exploits of Jack, one of the hipsters, who is doing all of this to make money for his girlfriend Avalon. After Jack's partner dies in a botched robbery, the Seagal henchman wants him to do one last job. Will he survive, or will Seagal finally get wise and get his revenge?
And frankly, do you even care? All right, maybe it's not that bad, it just had some issues. One, Seagal has no one to fight after he fights a rival drug lord in the film's opening twenty minutes. We needed more of that, even if it was only a couple more times. Two, instead of Seagal fighting more people, we follow the exploits of the Jack character, who, as I mentioned, was a hipster who called his friends "man" and "dude;" and his girlfriend "babe," while wearing his hair poofed up and his tan leather jackets slim-fit. Am I rooting for him? If not, why am I spending so much time on him? Finally, the film's biggest issue: Seagal knows what his henchman is up to, and has no other reason to delay stopping him other than the film spinning its wheels to get to 90 minutes. I think that's always a film's fatal flaw, if the only reason characters aren't doing something is to pad the story, it's hard to stay committed.
The thing is, I kind of liked Seagal in this, but when it's him, I don't know if the lack of him--and the lack of him having more good fight scenes--is by his request, and the filmmakers had to make do, or if the filmmakers actually made the conscious choice. That's one of the problems with streaming movies as opposed to having the DVD with a commentary track, we have to guess more on things like this--though if there were a commentary track, would the filmmakers have said anything to disparage anyone in the movie? Probably not, right? So we're left guessing why most of the Seagal in this film was him in a robe speaking with a Cajun accent and complaining about losing his money instead of having a couple more fight scenes.
We've seen John Edward Lee, who played Jack, on the DTVC before. He was the guy in The Lazarus Papers that had a Creepy White Guy relationship with the young trafficked Thai woman. To some extent he reprises that role here, the only difference is he's saving his girlfriend from selling cigars to other Creepy White Guys at a cafe, instead of from sex slavery. Either way, the issue again is, why am I rooting for him? From a movie standpoint, I need to know why I want him to prevail when I have a Seagal who is making me like him. I think the problem they ran into was, they tried to mitigate this concern by having us really root for his girlfriend, played by Pim Bubear, but if we focus the film on her, we lose the action of him and his buddy robbing the banks; so they tried to split that difference by then making this partially something of a bildungsroman where we watch the Jack character grow and become more sure of himself as he commits more robberies. As I think about it, I don't know how I would have mitigated all of these issues myself, and maybe what we got here was a best attempt to make it all work.
The story for this movie was co-written by Tom Sizemore (yes, that Tom Sizemore) along with director Daniel Zirilli, and then the screenplay was written by D. Glase Lomond. That might explain a lot of the issues here: with each new writer/contributor to the story, things can become that much more uneven. I'd be curious to know what the original story was like, but I have a hunch it was probably set in LA, maybe more of a throwback to a 90s indie crime drama, but when it needed to be shot in Thailand with Steven Seagal changes needed to be made, and that's where we start to run into issues. On the other hand, the story of the hipster boyfriend who needs to do anything he can to make money for the younger girlfriend he worships is a tired anyway, so it may not have been fixable in any scenario.
Not mentioned above, Michael Jai White has a small cameo in this as a gun dealer in Thailand. To me White was an underutilized asset the film had that could have beefed up the film in a more organic and exciting way. Maybe he's in cahoots with Seagal's henchman. Maybe the henchman uses White's character as a patsy to pin the robberies on. Maybe White and Seagal are buddies who spar together. Whatever it is, they needed a fight scene to flesh out some of this spinning of the wheels; but beyond that, White is someone who's accomplished as an actor, an expert fighter, and a great screen presence, all of which this film needed more of. (Note, soon after I wrote this, I discovered somewhere else online that Seagal doesn't like Michael Jai White, and that may explain why they didn't have scenes together. If that's true, then we all missed out on something that could have really enhanced this movie and made it better.)
I think that's a good note to wrap this on. For me, I feel like this could've been better. With more compelling characters, and more Seagal and White, we might have had a winner. Unfortunately that didn't happen, so overall this didn't work; but I did enjoy Seagal's work again, which has been nice to see.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3187378
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