Seal Team (2021)

It's April Fool's Day again, and in that spirit, I'm doing a post on something outside the norm for the site as more of a joke. The thing is here, while this is a joke post, it also gets Dolph Lundgren another tag, so even when we're not serious, he adds to his record-holding number at the DTVC.

Seal Team is about some seals off the coast of South Africa--which explains why they look more like American sea lions, but anyway--who need to find some fish, but the problem is the sharks in the water are preventing that. When rogue seal Quinn strikes out on his own, his friend Benji joins him, and subsequently gets eaten by a shark--perfect for a kids movie, right? Quinn wants he and his fellow seals to get out from under the fin of these scary sea monsters, so he enlists the aid of a walrus--or maybe he's a seal with a mustache?--named Claggart (JK Simmons), who used to be a part of a military program where he, another seal, and a dolphin (Dolph Lundgren) helped find and defuse bombs. Now he's going to train Quinn and some other seals so they can fight back against these scary sharks.

While I understand that I am in no way the target demographic for this film, after watching it I couldn't figure out who was. When the friend Benji is eaten by the shark, it happens off-screen, so I thought maybe he just disappeared and he'd come back at the end. Oh no, the shark ate him. Wait what? And this is for kids? As you can see above, Dolph's character smokes a cigar, which is great for us as adults, but again, smoking cigars in a kids movie? But it's not an adult movie either, the comedy is the crazy over-the-top (Stallone-style) kind that wouldn't work for an adult; yet it also tries to have things for adults like Seal--yes, the singer, Seal--whose hits would've been before a lot of the parents of the kids watching this listened to popular music, other than maybe the song from Batman Forever, so his inclusion would be for the older uncle like me who drew babysitting duty? Same with the "jump the shark" joke they made. The other interesting thing is it was made for the big screen, and on the small screen as a streamer on Netflix, the fast moving chases scenes and other action moments didn't translate as well, and I think also would've made it tougher for younger audiences to keep up. The thing is, this isn't horrible, it's not some kind of train wreck thing, it's just that tonally I don't know if it has a proper identity or knows who the target audience is.

We got another Dolph bait-and-switch here. Not as egregious as Ambushed, but the fact that Dolph was only doing voicework does make it particularly galling. He's in at the very beginning, and at the very end, and that's it--yet that was enough for him to get his own title card before the credits? When I first got wind of this, I knew I would have to watch it because it has Dolph, and considering it was direct to Netflix here in the States, I figured I'd need to review it as well, so April Fool's Day seemed like the best place to put it; but when I actually got stuck in on it, the reality set in that I was going to be watching a 100-minute cartoon that technically was supposed to be for kids. I'm not one of those types who's like "oh yeah, Finding Nemo has a lot of stuff for adults in it too!" My Dinner with Andre that I reviewed last year for April Fools is more my speed; but we have this mission that we've been on since we started the site to get all of Dolph's direct to video films--and even some theatrical films--reviewed on here, so here we are, in the interests trying to complete this thing we've started. As an aside, I really like old Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera cartoons, so it's not like I'm a total stick in the mud, but for whatever reason this new type of comedy in kids' cartoons doesn't work for me,

This was a South African production, and as such, I think there were some areas where culturally they didn't know where we are in the US in terms of certain language. The best example of this was the word "stupid." This is not only a word that's not used around kids anymore, but they're taught from a young age that it's not a nice thing to say. And this isn't a new thing, I remember when my nephew was between 3 and 5 in the late 2000s/early 2010s, he'd say "that person said the 'S' word." It doesn't mean it's censored out on popular media like say another "S" word, "shit," but no one making a movie for kids in America would use that word in their script, especially not as often as this film does. The thing is though, if you're not culturally up on that here in the States, you'd have no idea. It's another way though that this film doesn't make any sense, because I'm surprised Netflix, whose executives would be up on that, and probably are teaching their children not to call people "stupid," wouldn't have asked them to fix that if they wanted it available on their site as appropriate for kids. Maybe they didn't bother watching it first?

As I mentioned above, one of the seals is voiced by Seal, who performs on some kind of stage for other seals. I appreciated it as someone who likes his music, but part of me thought it was a reference that I'm not sure many people watching this would've gotten. On the other hand, parents are having kids older now, so there are more people my age that have kids in this target demo--if this is even the proper demo, because I don't know if I'd show this to a 7-year-old. To be too young to get the Seal reference would've put them as being born in the mid-to-late 80s, and I don't know how many people in that age group have kids that were born in the early 2010s. I think even some of those older Millennial parents may only remember "Kiss from a Rose" though, which was everywhere in 1995. I tried listening to it for this review, and couldn't, because I still had, as the Germans say, my nose full of it from when it was played twice an hour on every radio station almost 20 years ago. At least this movie, when it did use a Seal song, went with "Crazy," which wasn't as ubiquitous when it took off and gave me a nice sense of nostalgia.

Even as an April Fool's post, I wanted to give Dolph his second paragraph. This is now 71 films for him, which makes him 12 clear of Gary Daniels, who has the second-most films, but also, unlike Daniels, Dolph's recent output been more robust. Since 2021, Dolph has had 9 DTV flicks come out, compared to Daniels's 4, of which one, Law of Destiny, I can't find on streaming in the States. So not only will Dolph be number one all-time for the foreseeable future, but the margin between him and second place will probably grow, to the point that maybe no one catches him. On top of that, he's combining DTV efforts with big screen efforts like Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Expend4bles, and his highest grossing film ever, Minions: The Rise of Gru. We could make the case that this is a cheap tag for Dolph, because he's only doing voice work, and his character is barely in it at all, but Daniels also has his share of tags for very small parts, like in Final Impact. Essentially it all works out and everyone gets the tags they should. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Netflix. I honestly don't know if this is good for kids. It's definitely not good for adults. That just leaves Dolph completists, and something like this would be for the highest level completists--and if you're at that level, this won't be an easy sit.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8456190

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.