Code of Honor (2016)

With Mr. Seagal turning 70 this weekend, we had to do one of his movies to celebrate, and this one's been in the can for a long time, so what better time to review it--especially since soon I'll be getting to the point where I'll need to watch it again in order to remember what happens in it. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has done this one as well.

Code of Honor has Seagal as a retired military colonel who has snapped and is now waging a vigilante war against local drug dealers and mobsters. The cops have no idea how to stop him, but as luck would have it, his former protege, Craig Sheffer, is in town, and he knows what they need to do to take him down. The problem is, Sheffer has his own demons to tackle. When a dancer at a local club is a witness to one of Seagal's attacks, Sheffer agrees to help her, and protecting her and her son proves to be the chance at redemption he's needed. At the same time, criminals are still dying. What does Sheffer know about his former mentor that could help bring him down? It turns out they're connected in a way that goes much deeper than just Sheffer trying to stop him.

 

For a Seagal DTV actioner, especially one from this period, this isn't too bad. Mitch had this as his best DTV flick since Pistol Whipped, which I agree with and think was definitely true when it came out, and really only now I'd personally put Attrition over it. The major difference between this and Attrition though, is in Attrition we had a totally invested Seagal, whereas here we have our usual not invested Seagal, but the film construct makes it all work. Seagal doesn't talk until 48 minutes in. It works. He sits most of the time. Same thing, it worked with what they were going for here. The problem is, the card this film played from a story standpoint, can only be played once--it's the film equivalent of a gun with only one bullet, and they fire it here, so no other movie can use this approach to mitigating the Seagal Factor. Beyond that, the action was good, Sheffer was solid, and Louis Mandylor was the DTV mainstay we've come to know and love. For 2010s DTV Seagal, this is a pretty good bet.

By my count, we have three Seagal films left, Cartels, Gutshot Straight, and End of a Gun; and then we have others like Clementine and The Onion Movie if we want to do that. It makes sense, as he hits the big seven-oh, that he'd slow down some. We can compare his turn in this to another vigilante flick, Death Wish V, where Bronson was 73 when he made that. Is that the number for Seagal? Or should we expect him to go beyond that? An 80-year-old Seagal still making DTV actioners? And considering Bronson was killing people with remote control soccer balls in that movie, and also considering Seagal has been sitting more in his films since he's hit his 60s, maybe Death Wish V is the model for the newly septuagenarian Seagal going forward. I for one would be okay with that. This film also provides a roadmap for a potential less active Seagal, but, as I mentioned above, it's the gun with one bullet, and the film has already shot the bullet, so another film can't use this story device. 

This is our fourth Craig Sheffer film here on the site, but this might have been my favorite role of his. He does the heavy lifting expected of someone costarring in a Seagal DTV actioner, but it doesn't feel like he's doing the heavy lifting to support Seagal. The way the story unfolds, it slowly becomes more about Sheffer, which is very different from the usual Seagal fare where Seagal remains the main character around which the story revolves, but he sits while the younger star has all the hard action scenes. It's the perfect mitigation of all the limitations Seagal puts on a production he's in, and Sheffer is great in his part to make it all work. I don't know how many more times we'll see Sheffer on here, but he has a fair amount of older DTV stuff that we haven't done yet, so this definitely won't be the last time. Another DTV mainstay who we've been seeing a lot of here lately is Louis Mandylor. He's in that new breed in the mold of Eric Roberts where he's trying to pump out as many films in a year as he can, yet unlike Roberts he also has some pretty substantial parts in some of these movies, especially the Jesse V. Johnson actioners. He I definitely can say this isn't the last time we'll see him, because he's been in some films I have in the can that I'm ready to review.

One of my favorite comic book characters is The Punisher, and I appreciated the way this movie used the Punisher Paradigm. It's easy to just rip off that concept, but they did some unique things that worked. By the same token, I like the idea of Seagal as the actual Punisher in a reboot DTV film series. If you think about it, his first appearance was in Spider-Man 129 in 1974, which would've made Seagal 22, so he could be a modern, elder Punisher, making sense of nearly five decades of killing. That's the thing with comic book characters, instead of aging they're often rebooted, but for someone like the Punisher, who has no superpowers, he'd age like the rest of us, and it would be great to see that ground covered. There is some hope now that despite Disney taking over the Netflix Marvel shows, they haven't cut them at all; by the same token, could we see Disney doing the Punisher, especially a 70-year-old Seagal Punisher, the way it needs to be done?

Finally, back to Seagal, in addition to those last few DTV flicks I have to do here, there's the matter of the True Justice releases. For those that aren't sure what those are, instead of releasing Seagal's True Justice series as complete seasons on DVD, they released a series of two-episode "movies," and these "movies" are now available on Tubi. What's interesting is these were once listed on Letterboxd as part of his filmography, but have since been removed, I think because they're technically not movies; though, in the DTV world, we see this thing a lot, especially with failed TV shows, they'll be merged and packaged as movies to recoup some of the lost revenue on them. I guess the thing with these True Justice ones is we'll worry about them when we finish the last few actual DTV movies Seagal has left that we still haven't reviewed. It is very Seagal though that he would have his TV series released this way, isn't it?

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, you can stream this for free on Tubi. I think if you're looking for great Seagal on his 70th birthday, a classic like Hard to Kill or Marked for Death is a better way to go; but as far as DTV Seagal from the 2010s, this is one of the best--which isn't saying much, but still means this is a good time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4060866

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