Attrition has Seagal as a former special forces soldier who has seen a lot of bad stuff and is now living in an undisclosed area of Asia between China and Thailand, working as an acupuncture doctor in a small town and perfecting his Kung Fu. When a girl with special powers is kidnapped by a local gangster Qmom (played by Kang Yu), her family asks Seagal for help, so he calls in his old special forces team, plus his Kung Fu brother (played by Siu-Wong Fan), and they go to take him down. Qmom won't know what hit him.
In terms of recent Seagal, this is up there as one of his best. Not enough to make the top 5 I gave Ty and Brett, but definitely compared with the rest of his 2010s stuff, this is much better. According to imdb, this is a Seagal passion project, and I think that plays a big part, because it's good to have an invested Seagal not only doing his reverse shots, but also wanting to make sure he's doing everything he can to make this movie a success. Beyond that, we have some real martial arts talents in this, like Siu-Wong Fan, Kang Yu, and Cha-Lee Yoon--the fight between Fan and Yoon at the end is particularly spectacular. Now it does have its goofy moments, like I couldn't make out what was going on when a child in the village comes to Seagal for help when his father wants to kill himself, and when Seagal goes they're all just screaming and crying at each other, but when I get the kind of fights I got in this, I'll take it.
As a fellow Aries, knowing Seagal's birthday was coming soon, but I initially didn't want to wait until then to get this movie up, but I decided to wait and post it on his birthday instead of doing early celebration. I believe since the blog started in 2007, the year of his birth has changed from 1951 to 1952, which might be one of the most Seagal-y-ist things ever. The thing is, we joke about him doing movies where he doesn't do his reverse shots, doesn't come in later to record his over-dubbing, etc., but you can see with a film like Attrition that the passion is still there to do good work. It looks like his output has slowed some, because he was averaging about two films a years in the 2010s, and has nothing slated for release yet in 2020, so we'll see what this next decade has in store. At the very least, he'll give me some time to catch up on the backlog of movies I've watched and get reviews up for them!
We last saw Siu-Wong Fan in The Story of Riki. It was a bit of an infamous review here at the DTVC, because I thought it was too much, and everyone else was thinking "too much? Isn't a movie like this exactly what the DTVC was made for?" Anyway, Fan brings it in this. He's balls to the wall 100%, and I think he helps prop up the film in ways Seagal can't, which gives it an overall even feeling. Most of his career is in Hong Kong films, so for us to do more of his films it would probably come in another Hong Kong series like I did back in 2010, but at least we're able to see him again in this, and perhaps in the future he'll do more US DTV-release type films as well.
This film was also written by Seagal, and as such, there are some uneven moments, like when he and Fan are with their Kung Fu master, and the Kung Fu master kind of by the way mentions that he's also Fan's father. It was about as organic as a TV Dinner, but the reality is, sometimes a TV Dinner is just what the doctor ordered. I think that's the thing, we don't need Seagal to be perfect, just invested, and if he's invested, we can overlook any flaws. And then we all have a party and listen to him play music at the end.
Look who it is! Beatdown, aka Rudy Youngblood. I think it's been Beatdown since we last saw him. He's barely in this at all, which is too bad, because I thought he was good in Beatdown and would have like more of him here. According to imdb, he hasn't been too busy in the past ten years, so this may be the last we see of him for a while. If that's the case, we'll keep our ear to the ground, but Godspeed Mr. Youngblood, we wish you all the best, and we'll see you when we see you.
And on that note, it's a good time to wrap this up. Unfortunately it looks like Showtime is the only place to stream this, so if you don't have Showtime as part of your cable or streaming package, you'll have to pay to rent this. I'm not sure I would give this the $4 rental stamp of approval, but if you do have Showtime, this is definitely worth checking out--and who knows, maybe it's worth a splurge on his birthday!
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5465970
I really dug this one! So much so I bought the Italian blu-ray which didn't have the Thai dialogue subtitled, and then finally the US blu-ray that fixed the problem. Double-dip Seagal!
ReplyDelete